Flamingo House Chinese Cuisine – Dim Sum

We recently had a great taro duck dinner at Flamingo House (See our post here) and wanted to go back and try their dim sum.  While we’re a fan of the old-style push carts that they use, the food at dim sum doesn’t meet the same standards as their dinner dishes.

Take, for example, the Steamed Beef Rice Rolls…  The beef filling was sparse as it was, but if you look at the picture closely, you can see that 1/3 of the rice roll didn’t even have any beef filling at all!

Now, not all of their dishes were duds… I did like their version of the Steamed Beef Balls.  Most dim sum restaurants serve it with a small tofu skin layer on the bottom and worcestershire sauce for dipping.  Flamingo wraps the entire meatball in the tofu skin which helps to keep it moist and juicy.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of Chicken Feet but I’ve eaten them on a few occasions.  As you can see in the picture, the chicken feet are pretty big but I didn’t find them as soft and melt-in-your-mouth as they are in other dim sum restaurants.

One of the problems with push cart dim sum is that you start to see the same dishes being brought around.  Flamingo serves their dim sum using old-style metal dim sum steamers (haven’t seen these around for a long time).

The Har Gow and Siu Mai were pretty standard… not bad but not great either.

Another dish that we enjoyed was their Deep Fried Shrimp Wontons.  Warning:  don’t order the deep fried wontons at dinner… it’s not the same.  Unlike the ones we had at dim sum, the deep fried wontons at dinner are large deep fried wonton wrappers with barely any filling.

The pan fried shrimp and fish paste patties were pretty good but we were kind of stuffed by the time we got to them.

We usually like getting the steamed bean curd rolls so when we saw it come by on a cart, we had to get it even though we were already stuffed.  Unfortunately, the bean curd sheets were a bit too chewy.

If you’re looking for a nostalgic dim sum outing, Flamingo might be a good choice just for the experience but if you’re just here for the food, you’re better off to stick with their dinner menu.

Food:  dim sum dishes are pretty much hit or miss
Service:  4.5 / 5

7510 Cambie Street
Vancouver, BC

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