Elite dim sum

To celebrate a birthday, we had dim sum on Sunday. That choice is a crowd pleaser, because 3/4s of the family is sick of rice and beans, and the other quarter can't wait to go out to a restaurant.

Elite is really my favorite spot because...drum roll... a) instead of being surrounded by kind women proffering the wares off of their carts (once my son dashed ahead of us, by the time I got to the table he had 10 steaming containers on the table!) you order off the the menu. b) there are photos on the menu, explaining exactly what it is. I don't know where you eat Chinese food, but that in itself is revolutionary. So often I have felt glum and out of the loop, while people who could speak to the waiters in their language got something surely delicious. Sunday we got a few of those dishes we never knew how to order, like the scallop dim sum, and the sticky golden buns.

Dish after dish after dish. We devoured the duck, the macau pork, the har gow. But still the plates came. We ate the shrimp and asparagus in rice noodles, and bao. Good grief, did we really order three different bao? We ate quickly, to clear the pots for the next round. We spilled hot tea; we splattered the creamy goo of one bun all over the teapot. We continued to eat until we stuffed ourselves. Then we ordered another round of shu mai, and ate some more.

Can't wait for the next birthday there.