The best dim sum in town

My friends have just arrived from Portland, where it’s been raining for days. In Los Angeles, though, it’s a shorts and sunglasses kind of day. California’s budget may be in crisis, we’ve just elected the Terminator as governor, but right now, this is paradise. Even the freeway seems charmed. The force is with us as we turn onto the 10 heading east. Expecting gridlock, we’ve somehow caught the late-morning traffic just right and ride smoothly past downtown, past the 5 junction. Our luck holds as we slip onto the swift-moving 60, at this hour a parade of heavily laden trucks and motley cars speeding farther east.

Well before noon, just 30 minutes from Hollywood, we’re already at our destination in Rowland Heights. It’s Hong Kong Palace for dim sum. A Chinese friend who keeps up on all the restaurants tipped me off to the address. I’ve already been once, but so late in the afternoon there wasn’t much of a selection. But the siu mai dumplings I tasted that day were enough to convince me this was a real find.

A suburb just east of Whittier, Rowland Heights is Monterey Park redux, with a slightly more prosperous look. We squeeze into the last available parking place at the restaurant’s end of the shopping center. It’s 11:30 and we’re primed, visions of dumplings, barbecue pork and steaming bowls of congee dancing in our heads.

It’s early enough that we’re seated immediately: The place is only half full. It’s a weekday after all, I’m thinking. Right away a waiter in a fancy brocade vest brings us tea in a bulky white porcelain pot with a fat spout that looks like a faucet. The smells, the sight of food on the tables -- everything is so enticing that we need to steady ourselves for a moment before plunging in. We take a sip of tea.

Smaller than the giant Cantonese seafood houses in Monterey Park, Hong Kong Palace is more restrained in its decor. In other words it’s not dripping in chandeliers. Windows, though, get the extravagant swag treatment. The wall at the back of the dining room is deep red and embellished with a gold dragon and possibly a phoenix (it’s hard to tell from my vantage point). Another long wall is devoted to fish tanks filled with huge snow crabs, lobsters, drifts of live shrimp and rock cod and other fish. In one tank, geoduck clams extend their oddly long necks.

Now the fun begins, as women dressed in yellow and green embroidered Chinese blouses and ruffly aprons parade around the room with their carts, calling out the names of their wares. The first to stop at our table holds snowy rice-flour noodles rolled up with shrimp. She splashes a little light soy sauce on a plate, loads it up with the wide noodles, and sets it down on our table, not forgetting to stamp our dim sum ticket with a small symbol. (That’s how the cashier will know what we had.) Chopsticks poised, we dive in. Incredibly soft and billowy, with firm, breathtakingly fresh curls of shrimp tucked in the middle, it’s so tender it takes major chopsticks skills to pick it up.

Then the steamed dumpling server arrives, lifting lids on her stacks of aluminum steamers to show us plump dumplings filled with shrimp, scallops and greens in various combinations and drum-shaped siu mai. We take them all, and she lifts the steamers, dripping water, from her cart onto the table. The finely pleated wrapper on the har gow is so fine, it shows the outline of the big pink shrimp through the rice-flour dough. Steamed just long enough to barely cook the shrimp, this is dim sum at its purest.

Scallop dumplings shaped like half moons are filled half with snowy slices of scallop, half with shrimp. The taste is so pristine, they could have been plucked from the sea that morning. Siu mai with their shirred wrapping of fine dough are almost pure pork, juicy and sweet.

The only way you’ll find better dim sum is to get on a plane to Hong Kong. Everything at Hong Kong Palace is terrific. The seafood is impeccably fresh, the pastry and dumpling skins particularly fine.

Waiters go out of their way to be helpful to non-Chinese, telling us the names of dishes in English if they can, or if not, finding someone who can. A tall woman pushing her soup cart asks us if we want rice porridge. Absolutely. Congee is one of my favorite things. And this one is a bowl of boiling-hot rice porridge laced with bits of pork and thousand-year-old egg.

She comes back later to see if we liked the congee, and then wants to know if we’d like to try sweet tofu. I don’t know quite what she means, but we’re game. She hands us a bowl of the most silky tofu I’ve ever tasted. It looks almost like ice floes in the faintly sugared water.

When I remember to look up, the entire room is filled, mostly with big tables of friends and family. More people are crowded into the foyer. I notice a number of very elderly people with their grandkids or great-grandkids. Everyone at my table has the same thought: If we reach that advanced age, we hope someone will be taking us out for dim sum too.

At Chinese restaurants, I always like to see what everyone else is eating. Here, chicken feet are popular. The young couple at the next table are delving into what looks like a mushroom soup, but when we ask, politely, what they’re eating, they burst out laughing. Soup. Well, yes, we can see that. But what we think are mushrooms are actually big pieces of coagulated pig’s blood. I’m not put off by the idea of pig’s blood -- I love boudin noir (blood sausage). Though we’re curious, we’ll save the soup for another visit.

On the other hand, I can never resist the flaky pastries filled with barbecued pork. Here the layers of the pastry are as fine as mille feuille. The effect is salty-sweet, marvelous.

Weekends, it’s a good idea to arrive even earlier. The dim sum fancier knows you have to get there on the early side for the best selection. On Saturdays and Sundays the repertoire is phenomenal. There must be twice as many carts, with a wider variety of dim sum than on weekdays, plus other women circulating with trays of limited-edition items, fresh from the kitchen.

Turnip cakes are a revelation, a slurry of turnip puree with a silkiness worthy of Joel Robuchon, laced with chunks of turnip and browned on a griddle. Golden domes of bread that taste like challah are stuffed with barbecued pork. Steamed bao, chalky white, are filled with a savory mix of chicken and greens. One woman has pink shrimp cakes topped with hard-boiled quail’s egg.

Look out for the stewed tripe. It may be the most delicious I’ve ever had, better than trippe alla Fiorentina or tripes a la mode de Caen. The lacy, golden strips of tripe have been stewed in a rich chicken stock until sumptuously tender.

Pot stickers are fat crescents, much larger than the usual ones, with a stuffing that’s more meat than greens. And do try the taro root balls that look like hairy billiard balls. Inside is a dab of chicken or pork in a rich gravy. I could eat and eat. We all do.

And at the end, the bill is always somewhere between $8 and $15 per person. For food of this quality, it’s an incredible bargain.

This is not rustic stuff, but sophisticated, skillful cooking. Dim sum may be the best fast food on the planet, and in the Los Angeles area, right now Hong Kong Palace has the crown.

*

Hong Kong Palace

Rating: ***

Location: 19101 E. Colima Road, Rowland Heights; (626) 854-9829.

Ambience: Elegant Hong Kong-style seafood restaurant with the usual wall of fish tanks. The dining room is a sea of large, round tables with a red wall at the back embellished with gold dragons.

Service: Helpful and efficient.

Price: Dim sum, $8 to $15 per person.

Best dishes: Har gow (shrimp dumplings), barbecue pork pastries, pork riblets with black beans, congee, siu mai (shrimp and pork dumplings), taro root balls, sweet tofu, egg tarts.

Wine list: Beer and wine.

Best table: One in front of the wall of fish tanks.

Special features: Dim sum daily, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Details: Open 10 a.m. to midnight Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to midnight Saturday and Sunday. Lot parking.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.