With Christmas coming up next week and my other siblings all spending Christmas with their own family, we decided to have our own early siblings Christmas meal this weekend. Originally we were going to have dinner at either one of our home. Even if we all bought a dish along, hosting a big dinner for 10+ people a week before Christmas was still a lot of work. In the end, we decided to eat out, going for a classic Chinese dim sum yum cha.
What is dim sum yum cha?
Some of you may be familiar with dim sum. These are the little plates of food, normally steamed in bamboo baskets like dumplings, or deep fried like spring rolls. Normally there will be at least 20 to 40 different dim sum on the restaurant menu. Yum cha literally means drink tea. Cha = tea. When we say we go to yum cha it basically means we go for a dim sum meal, where drinking tea forms a big part of it.
However, note yum cha is part of Hong Kong culture. You may find it in places nearby or influenced by Hong Kong culture. If you go to say Beijing or Shanghai or cities far away from southern China, its not commonly known.
How to order dim sum
If you've been to the traditional big dim sum restaurants, you may see staff pushing trolleys around with the dimsum. They have a sign in front of the trolley to say what dim sum they
have, and you flag them down if want to order. These restaurants are quite rare nowadays. You need a lot of customers who order a lot of food to make the operation effective because you need more than one trolley to serve all the different types of dim sum and to ensure they sell out whilst they're still nice and fresh.
So nowadays, dim sums are ordered on a sheet like this. You tick what you want, and in our case today how many portions we want.
Dim sum towers
The beauty of ordering dim sum this way is that everything is freshly cooked. And then the fun part! Everything is served more or less at the same time and we end up with a table full of food. Because we have a big family, whenever we go to yum cha, we always order a lot of food. Today we ordered 38 dishes 😋 . I know, it sounds like a lot, but there's 11 of us so it's really not that much as these aren't full size dishes. It's just when it's all served at the same time, the bamboo baskets stack up like towers
it's quite a scene. We often get looks from the other diners!
This isn't a traditional Christmas dinner as you all know it. Our family aren't religious so we don't celebrate Christmas in the traditional way. For us, Christmas celebration is all about being together, that everyone is healthy and that we all made it through the year as a family. Whether we go the whole hog with turkey and trimmings, or an alternative dim sum meal, it doesn't really matter. Though of course having good food is a bonus and we had no problem finishing everything off.
We spent a lot of time chit chatting after the meal. By the time we left it was already 4pm. Everyone else had left and the restaurant was getting ready for the evening dinner service. Bring on Christmas next week!
