As much as I enjoyed dinner at Dolo Restaurant and Bar, the seafood-focused modern-Chinese restaurant I wrote about on Monday, I was more excited yet to learn that they were open every morning for dim sum. Dim sum is a favorite of mine not only because I love it as comfort food but because under the right conditions, it’s a great scene. I love the experience, culinary and social, of a popular dim sum place, packed to the gills with what would appear to be the entire Chinese-American community catching up on gossip, reading Chinese newspapers, and ordering food off the carts that are rolled around the room.
Michael Gebert
Dolo Restaurant and Bar
Michael Gebert
Egg custards and barbecue pork bao
That shows to me in some of the best dishes: the pan-fried corn-and-shrimp dumpling, the glazed barbecue pork buns, even the standard pot sticker, which is as good as any I’ve ever had in Chicago. Soup dumplings, xiao long bao, had a sweet flavor that wasn’t to my taste, but I was really impressed by the turnip cake in XO sauce. At Shiu Wah this had been a deliberately spartan dish of slightly bitter turnip squares, but here they were breaded and fried and tossed with spicy chopped vegetables—it’d be a great vegetarian dish at dinner. (I think it’s vegetarian, though there are some little flecks in that picture that make me wonder.)
- Michael Gebert
- Turnip cake with XO sauce
