| rev:text
| - many, many years ago the restaurant that used to occupy the space of sky dragon was a venue for extravagant chinese wedding banquets and special meals with friends and relatives. it's almost sad to see how the decor and fixtures do not seem to have been kept up over time. wear and tear here plead for an injection of makeover magic, or at least some fresh paint and new carpet and maybe some new textiles for the curtains and seats, and and and...
having said all of that, the dim sum is not awful. not at all. it's not great though. some of the best picks are those carried around on trays, rather than carted around. my personal favourites: steamed snow pea shoots. bland to some, but basic, fresh, and uncluttered by seasonings. i could eat two plates. i also like the lo mei guy (sticky rice and chicken wrapped and steamed in a lotus leaf), steamed curried cuttle fish, and the rice flour steamed pudding-like desserts. during dim sum, i do tend to prefer the steamed items since i feel they are lighter and easier to assess the quality of flavours and textures. they're more likely to be hot and fresh too, since cooled or re-heated steamed food leaves tell-tails signs. moreover, the logistics of carting food around a restaurant that size means many of the fried or cool items have been around the block.
steamed items that i didn't quite like: the har gow dumpling wrappers are thick and sticky and the pork and veggies wrapped in bean curd and bathing in salty soupy sauce (done well, they don't need pork nor much salt/sauce). i also didn't enjoy the pan-friend rice rolls - they were dry, even for a dry-stirfry, the "stuffed" eggplant was really greasy (and i never eat the filling), and the soy-sauce egg noodles with bean sprouts were extremely salty (as though they swapped the proportions of the light and dark soy).
apart from that, i found the service to be good. the ladies pushing the dim sum carts around were patient with my non-chinese speaking friends. one of them had never been to dim sum, and is vegetarian. the host even checked to see if she'd found enough to eat. she balked and said yes. however, when i asked later if she enjoyed the experience, she said she wished for more veggie options. personally, leaning on the side of being an accidental vegetarian, i thought there was plenty of selection *if* one knows what to order and speaks up. this is chinese food now.
the bill was very reasonable and we ate a lot with a few of the "large" and "special" items on the tick-box tab.
i'd go back maybe once or twice a year. and a large part of that is due to transportation and friends in the downtown core (vs my preference for dim sum up north)
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