In Southern China, tea cups and eating bowls are first rinsed at the table with boiling water or tea.As the foreign guest not accustomed to Chinese culture, locals won’t judge you as harshly if you make a mistake, but it doesn’t hurt to do your best! There is also a little bit of etiquette around eating dim sum.

If you hear the word “Y um” (to drink) , you should respond with one of the teas below: For your final order, I recommend ordering 1-2 steamers per person, with a minimum of 4 different steamers, so if you’re a group of 4 people, ordering 6 different steamers of dim sum should be more than enough.Įven before ordering, the first question that you’ll be asked is what type of tea you would like to drink. Normally, you would write a number indicating your order quantity (usually 1 is enough) at the bottom of each dish listed vertically.īut that won’t help if you can’t read the menu! Luckily, you can ask your server to help you while showing her the photos from below. Scroll down for pictures and 25 must order dim sum dishes. Seeing this, you might be too confused to order! But with the help of this guide, you’ll be ordering in no time. Usually you’ll get a menu that looks like this: A typical dim sum menu at a local dim sum restaurant! If you’re traveling to China, ordering off the dim sum menu is a little more difficult. However, you’ll still need to know what to order! Lucky for you, most of the best dim sum in the US has English menus. Ordering dim sum can be difficult if there is no English menu. Dim sum is also sometimes served from pushcarts, allowing you to point and choose what you want to eat, the easiest way! Dim sum being pushed by cart at a chalou dim sum in Guangzhou. A place to spend time with family and friends, sip tea, and enjoy delicious food. Dim Sum is found inside chalou 茶楼 teahouses. In my Guangzhou food guide, we explore the famous Dim Dou Dak restaurant where you can eat dim sum late into the night! All of the classic dishes are here, Hargao shrimp dumplings, siumai pork dumplings, chicken feet in black bean sauce, and BBQ pork buns! Traditionally eaten for breakfast or brunch, dim sum has evolved into an all day affair in many Chinese cities like Guangzhou. So when you’re hanging out in Southern China, and people say “let’s go drink tea”, it really means “let’s go eat dim sum!”. Yes, dim sum is so delicious that it will leave an impact on your heart and soul! People also commonly associate it with “yum cha”, to go “drink tea”. So I asked her and found out it literally means “to touch the heart”. But only after a few years of eating dim sum in China I asked myself, what does dim sum mean? Luckily, my wife Ting is a verified dim sum expert, growing up in the south of China in Guangzhou, the true home of dim sum. When I first tried dim sum, I was in love.

Dim sum meaning