Tuesdays with TT: Royal Seafood

The day after our feast at Maialino with our parents, we met up with our FBM friends for dim sum to celebrate TC’s birthday. As you know, we at Feisty Foodie LOVE dim sum. Since our friend Hungry, from Tasty Eating, was organizing, we went to her favorite place, Royal Seafood. CT and I have read some of Hungry’s great accounts of her experiences here and have had it on “The List” for a long time now.

Hungry told us that we should meet at 10:30 the latest. I found this strange as most dim sum places don’t get busy until 11:30ish. Once again, I was proven wrong as the place was packed by the time we arrived. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait too long for a table and since it was dim sum, food was served immediately.

Now although I have eaten a lot of dim sum over the past couple of years, I still don’t know all of the names of the dishes, so bear with me (and help correct my mistakes). Since Hungry was our “host” and knew the best dishes, we let her sit near the aisle and pick most of the dishes.

Pork ribs. I usually skip these as they can be quite greasy and a high bone to meat ratio. I was really hungry so I had a piece. It was quite good and not too greasy. The meat also came away from the bone a lot easier than previous experiences.

Meatballs. I think these were also pork. From what I can remember, they were kind of mushy and strange.

Beef ribs. These looked very similar to the pork ribs so I was a little apprehensive, but my hunger won. The bone to meat ratio was a lot better here so I enjoyed these more than the pork ribs.

Fried taro? I skipped on this.

Har gow aka shrimp dumplings. I think of all dim sum dishes these have the group consensus of being the favorite. They were pretty good here.

Lotus leaf wrapped sticky rice. A must order everytime. They were pretty big here and full of nicely sized chunks of shrimp and pork.

Beef rice roll. I would like to know what kind of cow this came from. It was not good.

Shrimp rice roll. Much, much better than the beef version.

Bun/Dumpling Hybrid with spinach and shrimp? Yup, that’s the official name. The “shell” was very sticky and offputting. Fortunately, the innards tasted much better.

Tofu skin wrapped pork.

Turnip cake. These were good because they were very fresh and still had a good crust.

Tripe. Only Yvo and I wanted to get this. I think I have only ever eaten tripe at dim sum. It was pretty good here. Not too chewy and flavorful. Very similar texture to calamari and octopus except for the honeycomb.

Chili sauce made it even better!

Eggplant. I also passed on this as it was one of the last dishes and especially greasy looking.

Shrimp shu mai. It may have been bad timing, but we missed out on a lot of the dumplings(or maybe its always like that?) These shu mai were very good. The shrimp were plump and fresh!

All in all, Royal Seafood was a good dim sum place. Was it better than the others in Chinatown that we have been to previously? No, but it was fun to go out with friends and enjoy more dim sum. Happy Birthday TC!