Curious Notions

8520 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77036

(713) 776-8808

Houston dim sum trumps Austin dim sum by a mile. I’ve tried 6 dim sum places in Houston and the one that my family and I always go back to is Golden Palace located next to a surplus restaurant supply store on Bellaire. Just nothing beats it. Not even Fung’s Kitchen which has a lot of hype and is a bit more showy and flashy than our humble but delicious Golden Palace.

I forgot to post pictures from my last trip a few weeks ago to Houston. I did promise to take more individual photos of dim sum favorites.

Very popular and very mandatory dish you must order: Shrimp dumplings.

Mandatory and popular again: dumplings with pork or prawns or both

Nisreen always orders this when we go eat dim sum. Good because greens are good for you. Steamed Chinese brocolli.

Sticky rice cooked with all sorts of things. Usually some pork in there, sausage, chicken. The rice is steamed and cooked with all the other stuff with it while wrapped by the lotus leaves. You don’t eat the lotus leaves but it does infuse flavoring into the rice. One of my favorites. We used to eat this for breakfast when I visited Vietnam.

Nino and I have to get our own plates of this when we go. He orders a plate, I order a plate, and then the rest of the table get their own plate. It’s steamed rice noodles filled with some kind of meat. We like the shrimp. It’s then doused in sweetened soy sauce. My ultimate favorite. It’s called cheong fun. Don’t ask me how to pronounce it. I usually just point to everything when we order.

Katambra and I like our egg cream dessert bun. A steamed bun with egg cream filling. Yum!

I’ll try to remember to snap photos of other dim sum dishes next time I have dim sum. In (dim) sum, Golden Palace is the way to go for dim sum in Houston, Texas.

Related Blog Entries:
- T&S Seafood Dim Sum (Austin)
- Shanghai Dim Sum (Austin)
- Jung Fung (NYC)

Last Saturday, I spent the entire day with Kim (who visited from Houston!), Nino, Bing, Nisreen, Jesse, Katambra, Deesh, and Britney. We started the day off with dim sum (which then lead to pool time, watermelon time, Trudy’s time, bowling time and then drinks and bar games at Sherlocks.) No wonder were were BEAT.

We usually go to T&S Seafood for dim sum unless we’re trying a new place. No place has matched it since we’ve started to go to T&S. I always forget to snap pictures because I’m so busy scarfing down food like I haven’t eaten in days. Truth be told, I don’t remember a time we’ve gone when we weren’t all ravenous. I like that I haven’t been to this place without this crowd ever, so in my mind this is OUR place. It genuinely tastes the best and the staff actually has a lot of fun with each other which always affects the service favorably.

I managed to snap 2 half ass photos last weekend of our food. People pictures were taken while we waited impatiently for the carts to go around. We were RAVENOUS. Big party takes a while to seat as this place is small and crowded.

Lovely girlfriends.

Cranky due to hunger.

Above is a picture of our table at one point. Nino and I love the cheung fun which is the steamed rice noodles filled with your choice of meat (our choice is always shrimp.) We get 3 plates of this stuff. 1 for the table. 1 for Nino. 1 for me. Honestly, that’s really how it works. Above, you can see 2 of the 3 plates we ordered of the cheung fun on the bottom and center. It’s always doused in a sweeter soy sauce kind of sauce.

Another dish I never leave without getting is a dessert. Steamed buns filled with egg cream. I gobbled mine up too quickly to take a picture of the filling. Since there’s all sorts of steamed buns, there’s usually a kind of marking on top to identify which bun is which. The egg cream bun is usually marked by an orange color or yellow color. Katambra and I were the only ones who HAD to have these.

If I can remember to slow down at dim sum, next time I will take individual pictures of dishes that are must-orders.

Nino, Nisreen, Bing, Katambra, my brother, and I went to our usual dim sum place (T&S Seafood on Lamar). I shared with my friend, Alex the night before and he asked me why I was going to T&S when Shanghai is better. Curious, I brought us over to Shanghai this weekend to try it out. It was just Nisreen, Jesse, Nino, and me. If you ever go to T&S. It’s not very clean. Tasty and good but not … clean? Shanghai has a little bit more ghetto location but walking in, it looks pretty pristine.

The food taste fresher. The Chinese broccoli taste better here and we all agreed that this is as far as it goes. The rest of the food was just… mediocre. It gets an A for cleanliness and for its Chinese broccoli. Crisp and not hard and chewy. Fresh.

The broccoli and pork buns.

Can’t have a dim sum experience without the steamed shrimp dumplings.

Can’t a dim sum experience without some kind of traditional dim sum dessert. Like these egg custards.

So Shanghai also gets an A for having creme brulee. It’s the first dim sum I’ve been to with CREME BRULEE. I had Nisreen snap this picture for me.

I should do a blog entry for T&S Dim Sum next time we go. We still choose T&S over Shanghai. Shanghai is also a bit pricier. It was 60 dollars for us when at T&S we’d get more for less than that.

I leave you with a picture of my brother. We stopped by the Asian market after dim sum so Nino could get some crabs and rice. He cooked for us later that night! Snapped a picture of my brother with the bag of rice and the hat he found. He wanted to buy it to go fishing with Nino and Deesh when they go fishing. I advised him against it. He might get shot by a war vet with a flashback.

Yesterday I was in San Diego sitting in meetings all day starting from 8 in the am.

Look it the candy wrappers from the first hour.

Then second hour… with pastry crumbs as well.