Dim Sum

Lots of Chinatown restaurants now serve dim sum, the midday meal that's a grazer's delight. Lee How Fook, a small, homespun place with a loyal following, recently added itself to the list. Cheap Eats already liked Lee How Fook because it's almost impossible to spend more than $8 on any entree from the regular menu. At dim sum, the stakes are even lower: $1.60, $1.80 or $2.50 per small dish. If you are not put off by vinyl tablecloths and chairs with masking-tape repairs, and fancy presentation isn't a priority, two can feast on some very un-Western fare for a total of $10. The only dim sum menu is displayed on the wall, written in Chinese.

At 11 a.m. each day, the dim-sum carts start rolling at Chin's, one of the newer Chinatown restaurants that specialize in Cantonese food as it is prepared in Canton and Hong Kong. "Our menu is 100-percent Cantonese," one of the owners told me a while back. "It is Hong Kong style. Some say Cantonese is mixed-up American style. Sometimes that is true. Like the egg roll. We don't have egg rolls. We have spring rolls. And chop suey is American-Cantonese, all mixed up with vegetables.

Nouvelle dim sum? You bet your chopsticks. And where else but at Susanna Foo, known nationally for its upscale and upbeat Chinese cuisine. Dim sum, for the one person reading this who hasn't seen the term before, are small, light dishes that many Chinese restaurants serve from rolling carts. The diner picks the snack-like foods by sight. (Which may be why I've never been tempted to order the chicken feet or duck feet served by many of the restaurants.) Pick a dish, eat, pick another, eat, and so on. When it's over, the tally is added and you've probably spent under $10 a person and you've had an entertaining afternoon.

For some, the charm of dim-sum dining lies in ordering dishes by sight. For others, the process of choosing food by appearance (and guessing about the identity) seems like a gastronomic form of Russian roulette. I waver between the two extremes, but I'm in the like-to-know camp often enough to appreciate the dim-sum list I discovered on a review visit to Chinatown's venerable Riverside Chinese Restaurant. The full page (double-spaced) dim-sum menu is complete with prices. At least half of the goodies are a thrifty $1.70.

In the ocean of shadows that rims New Century, a dragon is at rest. The giant snarl of its hollow head is perched on a tall wooden chairback. Its festive blaze of streamers pool in a colorful swirl on the carpet below. I've wandered across this massive new restaurant from the well-lit table where my companions and I are sitting. The only patrons on this rainy weeknight in a room big enough to seat 1,000. It is eerily tranquil now. But as I move closer to the dragon, it is not hard to imagine New Century springing to life.

They don't have corned-beef specials, and there's no lake nearby, but the Lakeside Chinese Deli seems destined to become a name to remember. It opened about two months ago in Chinatown and appears to have been enjoying a brisk business ever since. It's a plain, no-nonsense restaurant located on Ninth Street, just behind Metropolitan Hospital. It's comfortable, clean and offers little in the way of decor. What it does have is a good assortment of Chinese cuisine - from dim sum to Peking duck and Hong Kong Cantonese dishes - which is why it gets the name deli.

We ordered three dim sum. Then soup for two. My dining partner and I were deep into choosing a third main dish when our Kingdom of Vegetarians waiter could no longer contain himself. "That's too much food," he said quietly. It was indeed far too much for a normal meal for two. But in terms of exploring the vast menu of Chinatown's newest vegetarian restaurant? It was just a teasing sample. The K of V kitchen routinely offers 36 dim sum, 14 soups and 112 main dishes, all of them meatless.

When Susanna Foo opened her new Dim Sum Cafe last month, I expected that the city's most stylish Chinese restaurant would do dim sum differently. In Chinatown restaurants, dim sum is an informal affair. No menu is needed. Carts roll through the dining room, customers look over the selection of tasting-size portions, then choose what looks intriguing (or what looks familiar, depending on one's sense of adventure). Five or six dishes may be ordered. The bill rarely tops $12. At Susanna Foo, the setting sets the tone for a more formal midday meal.

Lakeside Chinese Deli was the kind of restaurant that often looked closed even when it was, in fact, still open. So I figured reports of its demise must have been mistaken. The old hole punched into its sign and the frequently half-drawn window blinds were simply the ideal camouflage from Chinatown tourists who weren't adventurous enough to pass through its unassuming door. For those that did, Lakeside was the ultimate joint. It was home to some of the best hand-crafted dim sum I've ever eaten.

Edward Ho says his restaurant, H.K. Golden Phoenix, has the best dim sum in town. "We've been open only two months and we are always busy," says Ho. "My chefs learned the traditional way. They trained when they were 14 years old. " Ho's dim sum chef, Tesk Wong, worked at Hong Kong's Holiday Inn, as did his kitchen chef, Wing Wong. As you can probably guess, the H.K. that precedes Golden Phoenix stands for Hong Kong. "These men have at least 25 years of experience. On Saturdays and Sundays, between the first floor and the second floor, we have 1,500 for dim sum. " The dim sum here is, indeed, excellent.

Dim-sum brunch buns The dim-sum cart is rolling in honor of the new weekend brunch hours at Sampan, Michael Schulson's light-shifting lair of stylish Asian-fusion bites. There are a few nods to the traditional, such as the steamed chicken feet braised in soy with ginger and five-spice. But Schulson's true talent is for taking authentic ideas and giving them a stylish twist for the mainstream crowd (Gen. Tso's soup dumplings? Nice idea, now if they only had more soup inside.) The best bets among the neat steamer baskets rolling through the dining room were Sampan's takes on bao , the puffy round, steamed, white-bread buns that sandwich crispy morsels of pan-Asian goodness.

It is just after noon, and the restaurant is empty on what's supposed to be the busiest day of the year - Christmas. Owner Peter Fong isn't worried. Catering to synagogues the night before had nearly emptied the shelves at his Singapore Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant on Race Street near 10th in Chinatown, so Fong had to make a quick shopping trip to get ready for the crowd he knew would come. As Christians gather with family to mark the holy holiday, a Jewish tradition also plays out: going to the openings of new movies and eating at Chinese restaurants.

Reader: Just wondering if you've been back to Table 31 since your original 3-bell review. Seems like there's a lot of (deservedly) negative buzz over there with all the menu and management changes. It seems like you're quick to pile on a chain (Del Frisco's) that doesn't live up to the hype, but if it's a Philly guy whose work may have been respectable in the past (Scarduzio) he's given a free pass. Craig LaBan: I'm not a "free pass" kind of critic, and there are plenty of chefs, chained and local alike, who will tell you that past successes do not guarantee future bells.

I don't know about you, but if I see a sign that proclaims, "Magic Kingdom of Dough" I'm changing plans faster than Ned Yost got the Brewers boot. Wherever I was headed on Race Street in Chinatown was a flash in the pan. I've just won the championship and I'm going to the Magic Kingdom, Zhi-Wei-Guan Restaurant. Owners Helen Xu and Winning Guan (he's the chef; she's front of the house) opened Zhi-Wei-Guan Restaurant May 17. They are committed to showcasing the cuisine of Xu's native Hangzhou, the capital of China's Zhejiang province.

I don't know about you, but if I see a sign that proclaims, "Magic Kingdom of Dough" I'm changing plans faster than Ned Yost got the Brewers boot. Wherever I was headed on Race Street in Chinatown was a flash in the pan. I've just won the championship and I'm going to the Magic Kingdom, Zhi-Wei-Guan Restaurant. Owners Helen Xu and Winning Guan (he's the chef; she's front of the house) opened Zhi-Wei-Guan Restaurant May 17. They are committed to showcasing the cuisine of Xu's native Hangzhou, the capital of China's Zhejiang province.

Many an ambitious young chef has gotten lost in the uncharted wilderness of fusion cooking, where the path between inspiration and incoherent nonsense is perilously narrow. One minute they're adding an Asian lacquer to their duck confit with a salsa verde flourish (a perfectly fine idea). Next thing you know, they're crumbling fried pork-skin crispies atop the chocolate gelato - an Iron Chef-like fantasy, no doubt, but one that in reality tastes as awful as it sounds. So it's no wonder the fusion trend, after a couple of decades in fierce flower, has been evolving to a more sensible ebb. The focus has shifted to updating authentic dishes with good ingredients and contemporary techniques, rather than simply grabbing a jumble of flavors out of context and reassembling them just because you can. It seems that Ben Byruch, though, has other ideas.

Lakeside Chinese Deli was the kind of restaurant that often looked closed even when it was, in fact, still open. So I figured reports of its demise must have been mistaken. The old hole punched into its sign and the frequently half-drawn window blinds were simply the ideal camouflage from Chinatown tourists who weren't adventurous enough to pass through its unassuming door. For those that did, Lakeside was the ultimate joint. It was home to some of the best hand-crafted dim sum I've ever eaten.

WITH THE Reading Terminal Market and all of Chinatown steps away, what could be enticing about a hole-in-the-wall in the underpass next to the New Century bus line? That is a question I kept asking myself every time I found myself drawn to Dim Sum Garden on 11th Street. With nothing but bus fumes and the greasy smell wafting from the Crown Chicken place a few doors away, there's not a lot to entice foot traffic. What you can smell is promise. Chef-owner Tom Guo runs the kitchen of this family business.

The small-plate movement is growing beyond its ethnic roots in Spanish bar food, Greek meze, and Chinese dim sum. It is becoming a new serving style, one in which you the diner can order-as-you-go, as your tastes and appetite move you: small plates and small portions, foods ordered by the piece. Foods meant to be tasted and shared. It is a change articulated by several local chefs and restaurateurs at a panel discussion last week at Positano Coast. They are, we were told, responding to customers' desires as diners ask for small plates, and want to order by the piece or to share dishes.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is a sort of theatrical dim sum. The piece at Mum Puppettheatre, staged by a group of local actors calling themselves the Quarry Theatre, offers a menu of bite-size plays resulting in a theatrical meal of many items and varied flavors. It keeps you hungry for what comes next and is, in the end, satisfying. Like dim sum diners, theatergoers here can determine the order in which they are served these tasty theatrical tidbits. However, unlike their restaurant counterparts, they can't pick and choose.