Dim Sum Go Go

Happy Campers against the colour that seems such a part of my life: on my terrace and on the Julian Schnabel building where a garden must be designed this spring...

I was so happy to introduce Vince to Dim Sum Go Go. It's one of my favourite places. Laugh Vince, laugh. I am about absolutes, I know. Bad! Good! This place Good! You, Good! No more cold vodka, Bad!


So, if I may: above, we have the ginger condiment (once, during a quiet lunch, I saw the waiters gathered around a table in front of the swimming crabs in their tank, scraping away at a pile of ginger...it is fresh. That impressed me) that lands in a trio on the table, along with XO Sauce, below, and a third whose contents remain obscure. Vinegar, yes...Vince loved #3...I usually ignore it. Now I know. The XO sums Dim Sum GoGo up for me. Crunchy, salty, sweet, can't stop eating it. It must be boorish, but I eat it neat the minute I pick up my chopsticks. I once asked if I could buy some and was informed that it would cost me $25 dollars. I bought some from a store nearby for $10 - and it was nothing like. Soft, not crispy.

What's in it? Um...things? Shrimp. Garlic. Chile. And...things.

The little dim sum menu was tossed at us with one of these pencils. I've never seen a long one. I admire the waste-nothing approach. Hm. Thinks. Decides to stop thinking. Anyhoo. We ticked off (checked, in Americanese): rice rolls with shrimp, parsley dumplings, snowpea shoot dumplings, shrimp and chive dumplings, duck dumplings (God, they're good), chicken and sticky rice in lotus leaves.



...and steamed pork buns for dessert.

Thanks to Vince we also ordered the tapioca dumplings - I having discovered recently that I love tapioca, as the island-boy in him does (I think we never had it as children because of its boarding school hangover). They were cunningly made of tapioca with an egg custard somehow inserted. Yum!

To pay for our cab ride to Chinatown and our modest excesses there we walked back to Henry Street over the Brooklyn Bridge, where we found this admonishment. After two XO Sauce refills it seemed a slap on the wrist to all Chinatown returnees.

Whatever.

Oh: and Mimi's Father? They DO have chicken feet!!! It's OK to go!