It's hard to write about a place that's pretty good. Restaurants that have great food, gorgeous interiors, and stellar service are easy to be effusive about, and it can be a pleasure to rant about terrible food, pretentious service, or ridiculously expensive meals. But when the place in question will not offend your taste buds or change your life, when it will leave you reasonably satisfied but not in total bliss ... that's a trickier proposition.
This phenomenon is compounded when you are talking about something like dim sum, which, at least for me, is one of those foods like pizza or doughnuts where "pretty good" will still make me happy. Obviously there are superlative versions in the world — airy yeast doughnuts straight from the fryer, pizza topped with fresh tomato sauce and hand-pulled mozzarella, juicy soup dumplings with skins so thin they seem to melt into the savory filling — but we are talking about things that I find so elementally delicious that any iteration will more or less satisfy unless it's out-and-out disgusting.
So, although Russian Hill's new Dim Sum Club didn't meet my high expectations, which had been bolstered by early reports from friends and the hard-to-please legions on Chowhound, the restaurant came close. I left with a belly full of dumplings and a smile on my face, which was no doubt aided by the convenience of the whole experience: I didn't need to trek out to the Richmond or wait upward of an hour to get inside.
It's an odd location for a Chinese restaurant, on the ground floor of a sort of dumpy hotel on Van Ness. In the mornings, the space is called the Da Vinci Villa Café and serves continental breakfast to hotel guests from a buffet in the middle. But at lunch the restaurant switches over, the kitchen fires up its woks and steamers, and starts putting out, if not the best dim sum in the city, at least the best in its northeast quadrant.
I try to avoid noodle rolls at dim sum — usually the uneven ratio of rice noodle to filling doesn't make it worth the stomach real estate when there are so many other treats in store — but these were a fantastic rendition, with delicate wrappers filled with a generous amount of barbecue pork and cilantro. (You can also order it with shrimp, beef, fish, spare ribs, and even Chinese doughnut in the middle.) That same light touch with wrappers was also seen in the shrimp dumplings, which were nearly translucent and filled with sizable whole, fresh shrimp.
The restaurant is owned by the people behind Guangdong Barbecue Tea House in the Richmond, and so the roast duck (which you can order half or whole) is definitely on point, with its sweet skin mingling with the fat and dark meat. It's greasy without being too much so, a hard feat to achieve with barbecued duck. My favorite dish, though, was the stuffed eggplant. At lesser dim sum restaurants it's a floppy, salty mess of eggplant and a little bit of shrimp. But here, the eggplant was still on the right side of firm, the oyster sauce had complex flavors beyond just sodium, and the sweet shrimp paste was slathered on thickly to make a savory sandwich.
If all of the dishes had been as good as these, Dim Sum Club would be an unqualified success. But it had its share of stumbles. Most notably, the soup dumplings, whose wrappers were too thick and undercooked in some places — and there just wasn't enough soup to compensate. The deep-fried taro balls were admirably greaseless, but much too dry — the juice of the meat filling didn't begin to penetrate the taro's starchiness. The sticky rice suffered from the same lack of moisture. And salt and pepper fried chicken wings had an interesting lollipop presentation, but the rice flour coating was way too sweet and also undercooked in some spots, with no discernible salt-and-pepper flavor.
Things improved with dessert, which served up small sesame balls filled with lotus paste, steamed sweet egg yolk custard buns, and coconut rice bean cakes that gave a nice counterpoint to the chile oil. The menu offers dim sum all day, and also a menu of other Americanized Chinese dishes. I tried the house noodles, of the thin, fried variety, softened with gravy and topped with shrimp, snow peas, beef, and other typical chow mein ingredients. Like the rest of the meal, it was far beyond mediocre but a few steps short of great.
We're blessed with plenty of great food in this city, but sometimes you don't feel like driving a half hour across town, or your hangover demands dumplings and noodles immediately, or you just can't deal with the crowds and the hungry expectant waiting. In such situations, pretty good is good enough.
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