Spontaneous dim sum
Impromptu moments in my family often lead to exciting food and travel ventures. One night when I was about six years old, my dad awakened us from our innocent slumber and announced, “we’re going to Williamsburg! “So what did the Stark family do at 11 p.m. that evening? Dad rounded up the troops, we packed overnight bags, and before midnight we owned the highway, heading for colonial town. It’s these kind of spur-of-the-moment ideas that make for the fondest memories.
Although tonight there was no nostalgic invitation to drop all that matters and plunge into a precarious expedition, spontaneity catered more tastefully toward our hunger pangs for dinner.
We’ve all heard of the ever-mystifying spontaneous combustion, but spontaneous dim sum is a much more digestible phenomenon to comprehend…… and I am a witness to such event.
This impulsive answer-to-hunger took us to Asian Court on Route 40 in Ellicott City. We were seated by an extremely friendly woman who, as we quickly learned, would add the roles server, personal sales woman, manager, owner, and best friend to her seating hostess job title. Not seconds after we opened our menus, this chipper little lady made her way back over to our table and started telling us what we needed to order. Adorable as she was, I felt exhausted after listening to her negotiate with my dad, who was enjoying every moment of the jumbled, language-barricaded conversation, what menu items we should try. Five dim sum dishes and three entrees later, we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. My dad had the audacity to ask our dear lady friend how the hot and sour soup was, and of course without batting an eyelash, she added that to our order, but so generously emphasized that the soup was “on the house.”
Along with the check came complimentary “cake,” which we discovered was not cake at all, but some layered, gelatinous squares. Following the “cake” we received fortune cookies, my fortune seeming most appropriate, then, to fatten us up even more, the endearing woman brought us warm lemon pastries straight out of the oven. What a dining experience we had! We knew we had best leave before they started feeding us more and more.Soon, our food arrived, most of which we had no idea what was contained inside. The main entrees arrived first: stir-fried rice noodles with chicken, shiitakes, bean sprouts, and scallions; Hunan chicken with broccoli, snow peas, bell peppers, and carrots; and a spicy minced chicken in black bean sauce stir-fried with an entire field of scallions. The dim sum dishes brought to our table were steamed shrimp dumplings, some unknown sticky rice concoction enveloped inside lotus leaves, shrimp and pork shumai, several large snowball-like barbecue pork buns, mystery meat rolled up in wrinkled egg wrappers. Everything was very tasty, my favorites being the rice noodles and the Hunan chicken. Being only three of us, we conquered a fair share of what was meant to be eaten by at least six people, and we had to ask for several boxes. And as if our quantity of leftovers was not enough to satiate us for the next two days, our new lady friend brought me over an entire meal’s worth of noodle soup in a to-go container telling me this soup was “on the house”and that I needed to eat it for lunch tomorrow. What a sweet woman!
PS – I’m not quite the runner, but I after the meal I thought would never end, I truly felt like I wanted to go for a long jog….. or more likely just to straight to bed. Asian Court has very good food and wonderful, maybe too wonderful, service and while the dishes weren’t the most outstanding Chinese fare I’ve ever had, I will certainly go back whenever I have a hankering for the cuisine.