First of all I owe an apology to NBC Seafood in Monterey Park for my prior comments about Tim Ho Wan in Irvine not being competitive with the top tier dim sum houses in the San Gabriel Valley, but rather on a par with the mid-tier of SGV dim sum houses such as NBC Seafood. Not having had dim sum at NBC for a few years, I had not realized the vast improvement they had made recently, and in fact NBC’s dim sum is significantly better than that of Tim Ho Wan. Now I never stopped going to NBC completely, as we’ve been invited to enough banquets there to know that there has been an uptick in the dinner fare there. Also heard some indications that the dim sum had improved, but since dim sum is only an occasional choice for us at lunch time we have been sticking pretty much to the SGV upper tier the past few years. However with a rare gathering of the less adventuresome side of the Chan family, NBC seemed like the ideal choice.
To say I was taken by surprise by the improvement to NBC’s dim sum is an understatement. My only photo is of the new window into the dim sum kitchen at the very back of the main dining room, though the dim sum off of the carts pretty much looked like the old NBC dim sum anyway.
But the taste of everything we had was a clear step up from the old NBC dim sum I was used to. For me, the more exciting development was the supplemental dim sum menu of alternate items not on the cart, following the path that Koi Palace in the Bay Area set off on a few years ago when they moved away from the cart only dim sum model. Unfortunately I couldn’t order anything off this menu, like purple yam buns and fried shrimp gok, given the company at the table, but it definitely is a reason to return here. And even the traditional items showed innovation, such as the beef cheung fun which was a mixture of the regular minced beef, along with sliced beef.