A bamboo steamer of har gow (shrimp dumplings)Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
I like eating in a bordello. Well, maybe not an actual bordello, but there is charm in a restaurant that looks like an expensive brothel. I am hard pressed to understand why both the décor and the outfits are like that at three of the most important suburban dim sum restaurants (Crown Prince, Casa Imperial and Casa Victoria), but they have now been joined by a fourth downtown restaurant, similar in style but unrelated.
The servers at the new Crown Princess on Bay Street (in the former 5th Element), as at the other aforementioned glitzy dim sum parlours, wear black-and-white uniforms reminiscent of either the expensive bordello of my imagination or Fran's Restaurant in the 1950s. Two million bucks worth of baroque décor is equally entertaining: Marble on marble on marble! On the marble walls there are marble "pictures" framed in marble. Big fat columns are capped in fluted marble, and there are a dozen or so large crystal chandeliers, each a little different from the other.
People with daughters will understand this décor. It's a design sensibility that demands a pink tutu and a rhinestone tiara. It's fun and frothy and so far over the top as to be inoffensive, which is perhaps what they were aiming for on the menu - the majority of the dumplings we ate had very little taste at all. Crown Princess serves its unfortunately bland dim sum every day from 9 a.m. till 4 p.m. (Caveat emptor: They don't take credit cards till after 11 a.m.)
My least favourite item is glutinous rice dumpling with conpoy (dried scallop) and egg yolk. This may be an acquired taste, but I eat a lot of Chinese food, and haven't met anything as flavour-free. It's like congee taken down several big notches. My second-least-favourite item is beef sirloin flour roll. It has greens in it, but no flavour agents that I could find, and hence, no taste. Really. The same problem afflicts veggie bean-curd roll with oyster sauce, which also suffers from mushy texture.
Then there is the too gelatinous (thanks to being not-quite-hot) barbecued-pork puff-baked pastry. That same puff pastry fares far better when it's rolled, fluted and fried until flaky and golden around seafood stew featuring a few nice big pieces of abalone. The other seafood dish that works is seafood dumpling in soup, which arrives in a glass bowl in the classic tall gilt holder. Just add the little dish of red vinegar to the pleasant broth and break open the dumpling, whose good strong flavour comes from mixed seafood, generous chunks of toothsome black mushroom and scallions. The threads of shark fin in the dumpling, however, are gratuitous.
The kitchen is kinder to shrimp. Oddly enough, the most prosaic of dumplings, shrimp har gow, are the best thing on the menu: Big fat chunks of shrimp are scented with toasted sesame oil and cooked just enough. Also blessed with some flavour are sticky rice packets with semi-soft egg yolks and ground meat. But a little flavour is no reason to run it up the flagpole and salute. Barbecued seafood dumplings do have some flavour thanks to an overload of garlic chives, and some crunch from sliced water chestnuts - but they are neither balanced nor interesting. Same problem with ho-hum vegetable pork dumpling Chiuchow style; the goose liver and caviar shiu mai benefits somewhat from its foie gras scent, but it, too, is nonetheless plain.
The same blandness afflicts black-bean spare ribs, whose flesh is tender, but covered in such a subtle black-bean-and-garlic scent that there's little reason to bother eating the little bits of meat on the bone. The fried octopus is similarly banal, its flavour statement a whimper rather than a bang.
As a lifelong aficionado of Chinese food in general, and dim sum in particular, I weep at the thought that anyone would judge my favourite cuisine on the basis of this.