Dim Sum in Victoria, BC

Well it has been quite some time since I have provided a blog update but I am back on track now! I don’t have a lot of photos to share from lunch today but I promise more in the future. We are blessed in Victoria when it comes to the quality of dim sum available, we have 3-4 great restaurants that have their own specialties and all produce great quality. Today we were having lunch at Golden City Seafood Restaurant (705 Fisgard Street Victoria BC, 250-386-8404) which is one of our two favourite dim sum restaurants.

Dim sum restaurants comes in two forms: cart service or menu ordered, each with their advantages. Golden City is based on the menu ordered service where you need to choose from 64 menu items, many of them with obscure names like: Ha Gow, Shanghai Dumpling or Pan Fried Meat Postickers; which leave the novice wondering what they are ordering. Other menu items like: Prawn Rice Rolls, Steamed Chicken Buns or Chicken Feet with Black Bean Sauce; are much more obvious! As a seasoned veteran I am happy to order off the menu, but I know it can be intimidating for the uninitiated. The menu can also lead to a lack of adventure based on the menu item description, for example, we enjoyed dim sum for over 10 years before discovering Stir Fried Daikon Cake with XO Sauce. It wasn’t until we saw some being served to another table that we decided to try a dish that is now one of our favourites. One we would order today!

When we arrived at Golden City the one and only cart swung by our table. Our regular server, a lovely Chinese lady with a huge smile always dressed in a traditional red dress, told us today they had neither the Prawn Stuffed Eggplant or the Deep Fried Prawn Rolls that we almost always order, so instead we took two other dishes: Deep Fried Spring Rolls and Deep Fried Taro Root Dumplings with Curry Chicken. As with many deep fried dim sum dishes, they are amazing right from the kitchen but lose their flavour as the cool down. So we quickly finished them off before ordering from the menu!

From their extensive menu we ordered an additional eight dishes, which turned out to be far too much for 3 of us. Prawn Dumpling (Ha Gow), steamed spareribs with garlic black bean sauce, stir fried daikon cake with XO sauce, pan fried chive dumplings, steamed prawn and chive dumpling, steamed prawn and cilantro dumpling, pan fried sticky rice, and bean curd roll with enoki mushrooms.

One of the most popular dishes in any dim sum restaurant is Ha Gow, there are no strange ingredients (shrimp, garlic in clear rice wrap) and it presents very well with four small dumplings. I use it as a leading indicator of the quality of the restaurant, if the Ha Gow isn’t good, odds are the rest of the order will be worse! At Golden City they are always excellent!



Pan Fried Chive Dumplings



Today we ordered both the steamed and the pan fried chive dumplings, which are prepared with shrimp, chives and of course garlic. The kitchen did not have any steamed chive dumplings today so they substituted a second order of pan fried instead. As you can see from the photo they look, and taste delicious, with a nice crispy rice wrap enveloping the inside.

One of our other favourite dishes which is not always available, even by special order, is the stir fried fried daikon cake with XO sauce. It was here at Golden City that we disciovered this amazing dish that is worth a try if you have the opportunity. The daikon cake is quite mild for a radish cake, but the XO sauce carries a bit of kick with some hot peppers. Unfortunalety for me, the cognac lover, there isn’t any cognac in this dish, but the Chinese spicy concoction makes this dish and many others, a real special treat, just like XO cognac.

Stir Fried Daikon Cake with XO Sauce

By the end of lunch we packed up 2 containers with our leftovers and headed off to the airport for a trip to Central Oregon where I discovered a gem of a Thai restaurant in the tiny town of Winston Oregon, just off of I-5.