Where to try dim sum on Long Island

Five minutes into a strip mall odyssey with Chinese food expert and activist Grace Young, I realized I’d been eating dim sum wrong my entire life. Instead of grabbing at the bites in a ravenous flurry of desire, the 2022 James Beard Humanitarian of the Year quietly reached across the table and served her dining partner. Using an extra pair of chopsticks, she dipped into the steamer baskets and placed one of each offering onto my plate. There was a snow-white roast pork bun, har gow (a.k.a. crystal shrimp dumpling) and a single chicken foot, puffy and plump in its sweet red glaze. She only ordered three of the shareable dishes at a time, because with dim sum, freshness is a big part of the ritual.

The tea selection was taken care of before we even sat down at Fortune Wheel in Levittown, a seafood-centric Cantonese restaurant that is also the oldest dim sum purveyor on Long Island. Young spoke to the server in Cantonese, requesting a Pu-erh, an aged fermented tea that originated in Yunnan province.

The dining room was sleepy on that Monday afternoon, a time when patrons order from the menu rather than roaming carts. A community fixture since 1992, Fortune Wheel is the first stop in this tour of the best Long Island spots for yum cha, a term that literally means “drink tea” in the ancient Cantonese tradition. Young, whose Beard award last year came for her pandemic-spurred efforts to save Chinatown mom-and-pop businesses in Manhattan and elsewhere, opened the stainless-steel teapot and a smoky aroma rose into the room.

A server set down a little dish of chili oil and spicy mustard that fused like yin and yang. Young did not touch it the entire meal. Nor did she touch the soy sauce in the aged porcelain vessel that sat on the table. She picked up a crystal shrimp dumpling in her chopsticks and examined the dainty purse, a mound of pink in its translucent white wrapper. “You can tell how good a dim sum restaurant is by its har gow,” she said, and then took a bite of it plain, so she could taste what it was all about.

Dim sum, it’s fair to say, is becoming a lost art; dumplings in particular require a dexterous chef with years of experience in creating miniature masterpieces for much less than they are worth. “Chinese food is perceived as cheap food,” Young lamented. “When you think about the labor that went into that, it’s crazy.” In some of the world’s best dim sum parlors, these shrimp dumplings can have up to 15 pleats in them. The bundle here did not have any pleats, and could have possibly been made by a machine, she remarked, a rising trend that breaks her heart. But the shrimp inside was crisp and sweet, a good indicator that during our search, there would be more flavorful bites to follow.

I have my own criteria for what makes a dim sum restaurant exemplary. And it’s mostly just a feeling. There is comfort to it, connection, glee. When I’m at a great dim sum restaurant with people I love, my body feels open and light, like the world makes sense for a minute and we’re all here together to enjoy it.   

Historically, though, this ancient Southern Chinese tradition was more of a men’s club. Well into the 19th century, Hong Kong men would bring their birds and hang the cages from a pole on the wall as they read the newspaper and had some snacks, Young said. (As to why the tradition is so strong in Hong Kong, the city is adjacent to Guangdong, formerly Canton.) It wasn’t until the early 20th century that dim sum became more common, and the iconic trolley carts didn’t come about until the 1970s or ’80s.

Dim sum was the first real food I ever ate. Turnip cakes, lo bak go in Cantonese, are easy to feed to a baby as the rectangles of mashed root vegetable are soft and mild, even when they are deep-fried and studded with bits of pork. Going to dim sum restaurants in the suburbs of Phoenix was a weekly event for my family, and over the years I became comfortable with the language barrier that resulted in brief, sometimes abrupt, communications with servers. You could say dim sum helped make me a person who enjoys navigating other people’s worlds. I have chosen places to live based on dim sum restaurants, and Long Island’s scene is truly fantastic. At this moment, it’s more exciting than ever.

Take 753 Dumpling House in Franklin Square, where, at 8:30 on a recent evening, music pounded from the dance studio next door as the table filled up with Shanghai soup dumplings, steamed buns and pitch-black fish cakes on a stick, shaped into flowers and sold as “seafood lollipops.” This spot—really, more of a takeout place—serves lots of dim sum and displays it prominently on the menu. And out in Stony Brook, with its university that attracts thousands of Chinese students every year, Red Tiger Dumpling House advertises its “no frozen, handmade, fresh dim sum art” with photos of bright-pink peach buns and green-tea potato cakes shaped into stars. Servers whisk out steamer baskets from the open kitchen as customers wait by the counter for takeout. (The pan-fried pork and vegetable dumplings, technically a Northern Chinese wheat dumpling, are superb.)

Dim sum was already a fast food before the pandemic, Young had told me, but suddenly it became a takeout food. That contributed to dim sum’s popularity at casual dumpling houses, where it’s served at night alongside noodles and pot stickers. And this brings me to an important point: Dumplings are a key component of the dim sum repertoire, but dim sum encompasses far more than dumplings. It’s an entire ecosystem of snacks such as savory buns, tarts, fried cakes and puffs, and even soups such as rice congee. To complicate matters, there are also dumplings—soup dumplings are one example—that are not part of the traditional dim sum lineup. Soup dumplings, xiao long bao, contain a rich pork-broth jelly that turns into soup when steamed. (For more about this Shanghai specialty, see page 62.) All the rage these days, soup dumplings have only recently become a feature on dim sum menus. 

And at the contemporary Jia Dim Sum in Port Washington, they reach their culinary zenith on the Island. Among the three varieties are truffle and spicy broth, which singes your tongue as you try to sip it from its soft dumpling skin that sags a bit, adding texture. Chef Kand Hu, formerly of RedFarm, a modern Cantonese restaurant in Manhattan, has crafted a gorgeous menu that uses soup dumplings and dim sum as a jumping-off point, even during dinnertime.

My first visit was at Chinese New Year, when servers carried mini Ferris wheels that swung with dim sum snacks to rowdy brunch revelers. By myself that day, sipping tea at the bar, I enjoyed a dim sum sampler on a wooden board; the (beautifully pleated) crystal shrimp dumplings were tinted pink and brushed with a shimmer of gold. On a recent evening, the scene was more relaxed. Date-night couples sipped lowball cocktails and treated the dim sum on the menu like appetizers, followed by bowls of udon noodles topped with, say, a whole Maine lobster.

A Loire Valley sauvignon blanc cut the fat of the savory dumplings with its crisp minerality, and taro-wrapped shrimp were shaped into swans. Those flights of fancy were not about flavor as much as texture—three distinct layers of it, with the tender shrimp in the middle surrounded by smooth mashed taro and a crunchy fried exterior. Another highlight was dessert, a pair of searing-hot egg custard buns with a cocoa powder crust that crinkled like a Mexican concha. Wowza.

Dim sum at The Orient in Bethpage. Photo credit: Linda Rosier

That’s what I had felt, too, after my day with Grace Young. When we had wrapped up our tasting of chicken feet and crystal shrimp dumplings at Fortune Wheel, we headed over to Long Island’s premium spot for Cantonese and Cantonese American cuisine, The Orient, conveniently just six minutes away in a Bethpage shopping center. I had to take Young here because I’d already fallen in love with it. The previous weekend I’d visited solo shortly before 3 p.m., the unofficial dim sum ending time. As the carts started to disappear, owner Tommy Tan grabbed the remaining plates of pan-fried leek dumplings and practically forced them on diners (“Do you want this? It’s really good!”), so they didn’t go to waste. They were wonderful, crisp on the edges and meaty in the middle.

On the day I visited with Young, the room was buzzing with big families chatting around lazy Susans. At one of those tables, laden with multiple stir-fries, a woman unwrapped her sticky rice from a lotus leaf and began to pile different meats from those dishes around it, like an Indonesian or Burmese rice platter. The most beautiful plate coming out of the kitchen that afternoon was the eggplant stuffed with ground shrimp. I ordered one for Young and her enthusiasm matched mine. She was equally pleased with the har gow—pleated, delicate, most definitely made by hand.

As we got up to leave, I told Tommy Tan I thought the meal was amazing. “I know you did, you were talking really loud,” he said, in a sort of reprimand but also maybe a joke. And maybe a little proud, like a family member.

By Andi Berlin

andi.berlin@newsday.comAndiBerlin

Andi Berlin is from Arizona and does not know where she is going. But when she gets there, she’ll find something beautiful and delicious that the world needs to taste.