Shi-Art Chinese Cuisine – Dim Sum

We’ve walked past Shi-Art Chinese Cuisine whenever we head down to Richmond Centre but we’ve never ventured in until recently.  Our dim sum didn’t start out too well but it did get better as the meal progressed.

Our first dish was the Deep Fried Chicken Wings with Spicy Salt – I was hoping for something along the lines of either Phnom Penh or even Dinesty Chinese Restaurant but what we received was a plate of chicken wings covered in fried garlic.  The chicken wings themselves weren’t too bad but they weren’t spicy at all.

I mentioned that the dim sum didn’t start out well, right?  Well, as soon as we were served our lackluster chicken wings, the waiter came by and gave us our bill to pay.  At first I was a little confused… I’ve heard of places rushing diners out quickly but never before receiving the dishes!  We managed to figure out that they have a discount if you pay for your food before 11am and they were just letting us pay first to get the discount since it was just before 11am.

The Steamed BBQ Pork Buns were pretty good and were packed full of sweet, caramelized bbq pork inside the soft and fluffy buns.

Veggies with our Steamed Beef Rice Rolls?  Bonus!  Besides the nice addition of a couple of pieces of veggies, the actual rice rolls were pretty good with nice portions of meat inside.  I do like that the soy sauce comes served on the side so you can choose how much to use.

Our next dish was just called Steamed Seafood and Meat Dumpling so we weren’t entirely sure what to expect.  Turns out that it was a combination of pork, shrimp, mushroom, and cilanatro stuffed inside a semi-translucent, sticky and gelatinous wrapper.  These were pretty good and full of flavour but the sticky wrappers were difficult to pick up without tearing open.

I liked the Mini Sticky Rice wrapped in Lotus Leaf.  Inside each of these three lotus leaf wrappers is a combination of stick-to-your-bones sticky rice, bamboo shoots, mushrooms and lap cheong (Chinese sausage).

So while our dim sum started off a little bad at first, it did get better as the meal progressed and most of the food items were pretty good.  It did feel a little strange at the end of our meal – just getting up and leaving (since we had already paid our bill at the start of the meal)… almost felt like we were doing a dine-and-dash.

Food:  3.5 / 5
Service:  3 / 5

6551 No 3 Road
Richmond, BC

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