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Daily Dish

Object of Desire: Dim sum for dinner

By Betty HallockDeputy Food Editor 
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Of all the questions I am asked, the one that has perhaps popped up the most often is: ‘Where do you go for dim sum at night?’ I have never had a proper answer to this.

You can get dumplings at night, of course –- Din Tai Fung and 101 Noodle Express do decent dinnertime business –- but the food they serve is from northern China, properly not dim sum at all. There are any number of chain and proto-chain Chinese-lite restaurants pumping out Dim Sum and Then Sum and its like. And apart from the occasional plate of stale pork buns a Chinatown bakery might have left over from lunch, that’s about it.

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Dim sum is properly breakfast food, and a Monterey Park waiter asked about har gow at dinnertime will flinch the way a waiter at Musso’s might if you asked him about pancakes. Dim sum and dinner food are usually prepared by completely different staffs -– at a newish San Gabriel Shanghai-style restaurant, a friend noticed that the morning dim sum crew was speaking Cantonese.

So I am happy finally to have an answer to this question: Lunasia, not just a dim sum restaurant but possibly a top-5 dim sum restaurant, is now serving dim sum for dinner, which means you can get top-notch rice-noodle doughnut rolls, fist-size shiu mai, sticky-rice wraps, milk buns, baked barbecued pork bao, live-fish congee and dozens of other dim sum -- as well as dim-sum-size portions of duck, roast chicken, and Lunasia’s famous Macao-style roast pork belly, which may be the best version in the San Gabriel Valley -- until 8:30 p.m. You won’t see carts. Lunasia was one of the first places in town to go over to all-menu dim sum several years ago. But when spicy chicken feet and plates of rolled rice noodles stir-fried in chile oil are involved, it may not matter. Think of it as Hong Kong’s answer to chicken ‘n’ waffles.

500 W. Main St., Alhambra, (626) 308-3222.

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-- Betty Hallock

Daily Dish
Betty Hallock

Betty Hallock is deputy Food editor at the Los Angeles Times. She has co-written four cookbooks, including “Bäco: Vivid Recipes from the Heart of Los Angeles,” “Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen” and “Baking at République.” She started her journalism career at the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American in New York, worked on the L.A. Times’ Business desk, and was interim food editor at Los Angeles Magazine. Hallock also helped launch a food and nutrition vertical for wellness app RoundGlass. She’s a graduate of UCLA and New York University.

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