A Beginner's Guide to Dim Sum.

Dim sum is a Cantonese meal of small dishes, eaten with tea, usually between about 9am and 2pm. Nothing arrives in courses. Plates come as they are ready, everyone shares, and the table fills up.

The intimidating part is not the food, it is the ordering system. Here is how it works and what to get.

How ordering works

Two formats, and increasingly the second one.

Carts. Servers push trolleys of stacked steamer baskets between tables. You point at what you want, they set it down and mark your card. You can lift a lid and look — this is normal and expected.

Order sheets. A paper menu with a column for quantities, which you tick and hand over. Slower to start, but everything arrives freshly steamed rather than having circled the room, and most serious restaurants have moved this way.

Either way, the card on your table records what you took. Dishes are priced by size — small, medium, large, special — and the bill is the count in each column, not a per-item price. This is why the card is stamped rather than written on.

Tea comes first and is not optional; there is usually a small per-person tea charge. Jasmine, pu-erh, oolong or chrysanthemum are the standard choices. When your pot is empty, leave the lid tilted open — that is the signal for a refill without having to flag anyone down.

What to order the first time

Six dishes for two people is generous. Start here:

• Har gow (蝦餃) — shrimp dumplings in a translucent wheat-starch wrapper, pleated. The benchmark dish: the wrapper should be thin enough to see through and strong enough not to tear, and the shrimp should snap.
• Siu mai (燒賣) — open-topped pork and shrimp dumplings in a thin yellow wrapper, often topped with roe. The other benchmark.
• Char siu bao (叉燒包) — barbecue pork buns. Steamed, they are white and pillowy and split open at the top; baked, they are glazed and slightly sweet.
• Cheung fun (腸粉) — wide rice noodle rolled around shrimp, beef or fried dough, with sweet soy poured over. Slippery and very soft.
• Lo mai gai (糯米雞) — sticky rice with chicken, sausage and mushroom, steamed inside a lotus leaf. Filling; one is enough for a table.
• Egg tarts (蛋撻) — order at the end, and only if they are fresh.

Once you know what you like

• Xiao long bao — soup dumplings. Shanghainese rather than Cantonese, and now on most dim sum menus. They have their own rules; see what soup dumplings are.
• Turnip cake (蘿蔔糕) — daikon and rice flour, pan-fried until crisp on both faces.
• Chicken feet (鳳爪) — braised in black bean sauce. Almost entirely skin and cartilage; the texture is the appeal.
• Har cheung fun with fried dough — rice noodle wrapped around a crisp cruller, for the texture contrast.
• Gai lan — Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce. Order a green; a table of only dumplings gets heavy fast.

Practical rules

• Go early. Peak is 11am to 1pm on weekends, and waits of an hour are common. Before 10.30 there is no queue and the kitchen is fresher.
• Order in waves. Get four or five things, eat them, order again. Everything ordered at once arrives at once and goes cold.
• Steamed first, fried later. Delicate dumplings taste of less after your mouth has had deep-fried taro.
• Don't fill up on rice or noodles early. They are the cheapest way to occupy the table.
• Chilli oil and soy are on the table, and har gow does not need either. Try one plain first.

How to judge a dim sum restaurant

Two dishes tell you almost everything. Har gow exposes wrapper technique — too thick and it is doughy, too thin and it splits in the basket. Cheung fun exposes freshness, because a rice noodle made hours ago goes firm and rubbery no matter how good the sauce is.

If both are good, order broadly. If either is poor, stick to the baked and fried items, which forgive more.

Where to eat it in the South Bay

Forkelo has not built a dim sum ranking yet — the catalog so far covers Vietnamese, Mexican, Japanese and American dishes. When we do, it will score the individual dishes rather than the restaurant, because a dim sum house with excellent har gow and mediocre everything else is a real and common thing that a single star rating cannot express.

In the meantime, the guides index has the rest of the ordering guides, and the explore page lists every ranking built so far.