Palette Tea House

anybody been? same folks being dragon beaux and koi palace.

Their website didn’t work but I’m sure it will. I actually read some Yelp reviews ! to get a sense of it. It seems like it’s not “Chinese” but rather Asian - some Japanese as well as Chinese.

Will locals go to Ghirardelli? I probably haven’t been there in over 30 years. And the prices must be quite something when you consider the ingredients. I’ll be curious to read more about it

Thanks for sharing.

Skimming the photos on Yelp it looks plenty Chinese to me.

Sure, they’re using a few Japanese ingredients. So does every French restaurant in the city.

Frankly, it was mediocre with high flying prices for a dim sum restaurant. Nearly as expensive as LKH in HK, without the quality or creativeness of the latter. The only thing passable as a good dish, was the deep fried “typhoon” dungeness crab and the spot prawns, but that’s only because they’re in season.

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@robert, are there any really good to great restaurants in HIGHLY touristy areas?

In the US, a restaurant that gets most or all of its business from tourists has little or no financial incentive to serve good food.

Around Fisherman’s Wharf, I think Gary Danko might be an exception in part because it’s on a relatively quiet back street a block uphill from the main tourist path. Scoma’s is a family place that maybe serves better food than they need to out of pride.

Oh, I haven’t been there in forever.

Let’s be fair here. It’s only about 60% of LKH prices. :sunglasses:

Their cheong fun isn’t done well.
Picture courtesy of Yelp

Har gow is steamed quite well since the wrappers are more white-ish and dry looking rather than translucent and wet looking
Picture courtesy of Yelp

The swan puff looks like a poor imitation of T’ang Court Shanghai’s
Picture courtesy of Yelp

Picture courtesy of Fine Dining Explorer

The searing on these turnip cakes is too dark
Picture courtesy of Yelp

I think overall, the steaming skills at this place is probably better than the SGV dim sum restaurants after I went through some of the Yelp pictures and their stuff is plenty Cantonese with a modern twist.

@JLee Iberico char siu alert for about half the price of Mott 32’s

Sometimes I wonder if its even really iberico.

I’ve seen Chinese restaurants carelessly use terms like kurobuta and jidori with reckless abandon because they think they were good adjectives and not trademarked names.

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The texture alone should be fairly easy to distinguish if they actually used Iberico. As far as kurobuta and jidori go, I wouldn’t know if the restaurants decide to lie about it.

You may want to read chandavkl’s write-up:

Perhaps they could be combined.

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