What Am I Eating?

Hei La Moon - 1 star
88 Beach St., Boston

We went into Boston on Sunday to pick up my nephew Thomas, who is visiting for a few weeks. Thomas is a pretty adventurous eater, especially for a 14-year-old from Southern Virginia, so we went to Chinatown for dim sum (Sunday, remember?). We went to Hei La Moon, one of the more popular places in Boston, which is the classic Chinatown Sunday dim sum experience: huge (probably seating 300 people at once), packed with mainly Chinese families, devoid of decor, loud, and bustling.

Dim sum is a wonderful idea - people circulating through the room with rolling steam tables of all sorts of yummy stuff, so there's no deferral of gratification. And having lived in New York, Cambridge, and Berkeley, and having eaten dim sum dozens of times, you would think I would be an expert. But this was my first time since becoming a vegetarian, and the old strategy of just pointing at things and eating all of them didn't work so well. The strategy of asking what's in them doesn't work either, since most of the waiters barely spoke English.

But they had all the staples, and I found enough things to eat, although most of the dishes had some combination of pork, chicken, and shrimp. In the end I don't think there's such a wide quality range when it comes to dim sum. But someday someone will open a dim sum-style restaurant where they serve Spanish-style tapas, and the circulating waiters also have bottles of wine to pour by the glass, and and make a killing.