One quiet evening in Yum Cha not long ago two Asian women—veritable little old ladies—sat for hours in a dim alcove daintily chopsticking rice from bowls held up to their chins. That’s the kind of eater you look for when you walk into a restaurant: one who looks like she knows what she’s doing
There’s nothing that troubling on the menu at Yum Cha—perhaps due to the sobering influence of Eddy “Chi Ping” Cheung of Chinatown’s venerable Phoenix restaurant, who consults on staff training. But there is a sort of duality (schizophrenia?) to the menu, which, while not as encyclopedic as your typical Cantonese restaurant’s, is still fairly long and varied. You have your dim sum menu, featuring some 54 individual snacks, and then a greatly expanded general dinner menu with beef, poultry, pork, seafood, and vegetable dishes, plus soup, noodles, and rice. Lunchtime is primarily dim sum time, with rolling carts distributing the more traditional and presumably more durable snacks, plus an abbreviated version of the dinner menu.
In general—and with the exception of an extraterrestrially aqua-blue kale-and-squash-stuffed dumpling that tastes like Moosewood Does Dim Sum—the assorted dumplings at Yum Cha are expertly constructed, bulging, securely wrapped, and occasionally finished to good effect, such as a seared oxtail-stuffed pot sticker topped with a gob of bitter ginger-scallion pesto. Most significantly, Yum Cha’s xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, are marked with Aglibot’s sigil on the menu, but they don’t appear to have been gussied up at all. They’re simply very well-made pork purses that hold together all the way up to the crucial bite and slurp.
333 E. Randolph 312-946-8885yumchachicago.com
