San Francisco - Imperial Palace Restaurant

Lychee Garden on Powell Street in San Francisco's Chinatown used to be THE place that we go for our semi-weekly weekend dim sum meal, however, when they decided to stop serving dim sum a few months back and left us high and dry without our dim sum fix, our searched had once again continued for the perfect dim sum place.

If you don't know what dim sum is, the way I like to explain it is to think of it as a Chinese buffet where they bring the food to your table, or Brazilian BBQ except you can't eat till you explode for one low price. Or if you eat sushi, it's very much like a floating sushi bar but larger; the whole restaurant is the bar, the food is on a cart and people push it around the restaurant and pass by your table.

My bf saw Imperial Palace on the Travel Channel the other day and was itching to go try it; after a little research it turns out that the predecessor of this location was the Golden Dragon Restuarant where the Chinese gang shooting took place back in 1977, but since I am here to talk about food and not to give a history lesson, you can find some more info on wiki if you would like to read more about what happened to the Golden Dragon.

So in order to become our regular dim sum spot, there are only three criteria that needs to be met: service, taste, and value. Hmm... come to think of it, this is the same criteria how I judge most restaurant, I should probably elaborate a little.

At dim sum places, especially those with the push carts, the way I judge service is essentially how fast the food find our table. I don't need a five star restaurant service at a dim sum place, I don't need someone to check in on us every 5 minutes to see how we're doing, but I would like to see a food cart pass by us every 5 minutes (more or less).

In this case, Imperial Palace failed it miserably. This was truly an odd sight to see! A push cart dim sum place with no one pushing the carts full of food! There were two carts full of food at the back of the dining room just sitting there for 15 minutes! (upper picture, and that lady was not serving food yet)

I was not quite sure of the reasoning behind this; maybe they were being very considerate of their patrons and were waiting for the food to cool down so we won't burn the roof of our mouth? Or maybe this place is self-service and we just didn't know it cause we're new here. Wait, wait, I have another idea... or maybe... just maybe they are not quite organized and there was some poor management going on, cause we saw the restaurant manager go to the back and broke up a conversation between two ladies, pointing fingers, kind of upset, and then the carts started to roll out. Hmm.... well, I'll let you be the judge of that.

Ha gar and shu mai

The taste for the food is debatable. For me the shrimp dumpling (ha gaw) and the Cantonese style radish cake taste decent, it's not the best, but it's pretty good, however the rest of the dishes were a little bland to me. If you ask my bf's dad though, he thought the food was pretty good and tasty. He especially liked the spare ribs at this place, and to us that says a lot, cause most of the spare ribs at the dim sum places we go to doesn't meet his standard, not even our once upon a time favorite, Lychee Garden.

Spare ribs and radish cake

BBQ pork bun and long rice noodle stuffed with shrimp

As for the value, it was not too bad. There were a bit of variety for the dishes. Each small dish was $2.20, medium $2.80, and large dishes were $3.20. For the three of us, the bill came to be a little under $40.00 and we had some food to take back home.

The dining experience at the Imperial Palace was a bit of a hit and miss. I have to say that there were quite a bit of local Chinese patrons in the restaurant, so to a person other than myself and my bf, this place might be a pretty good place to go, but for me the quest must go on.

If you're a person who never had dim sum before and might want to try it, I would strongly recommend the shrimp dumpling (ha gaw), pork dumpling (shu mai), and "steamed" BBQ pork bun to start as those are the staples, and order anything else that interests you. Dim sum might not be for everyone, but it can definitely be a fun and unique dining experience.