The Power of Bao

Hong Kong Low Deli. If you're the least bit nostalgic for the Chinatown that existed before the last wave of immigration, Hong Kong Low Deli is essential, tucked away in a back alley behind tourist Chinatown, a steamy, takeout-only redoubt of flaky chicken buns and squares of fried taro stacked behind greasy panels of glass. The deli serves what dim sum used to be back when everybody called it "teacakes," barbecued-pork buns and custard buns and gorgeous egg-yolk custard tarts the vivid yellow of a 5-year-old's painting of the sun, pulled straight out of ovens or steamers. Ten dollars' worth of shrimp dumplings and egg rolls will comfortably feed the UCLA starting five. Hong Kong Low Deli is the kind of thing the city's Cultural Heritage Commission should be dedicated to preserving instead of a bunch of old buildings that don't even have restaurants in them. 408 Bamboo Lane, Chinatown, (213) 680-9827.

Scenes from the morning shift at 888 (Photos by Anne Fishbein)

Empress Harbor — who makes up the names of these places? — is still probably the fanciest banquet hall in Monterey Park, no longer quite the establishment standby that it was when the dining room housed Harbor Village, but still opulent enough for a grand wedding. I had pretty much given up on the restaurant after a mediocre dinner a couple of years ago, but a recent dim sum breakfast was superb, a procession of slippery rice noodles, barbecued duck, steamed scallop dumplings, griddled bao and whole fried shrimp on a stick that was everything you could ask for, executed with a crisp efficiency that other dim sum houses don't even attempt. In good Chinese restaurants, individual dishes can be memorable. In great Chinese restaurants, what you remember is the meal. 111 N. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park, (626) 300-8833.

THERE MAY BE NOTHING IN LOS ANGELES TO RIVAL THE major Cantonese restaurant, home to a thousand wedding feasts, a gleaming centerpiece of new development, a shrine to the miracles of late-model capitalism and the wonders of live steamed prawns. These places are huge, long as soccer fields and nearly as wide, some of them, dominated by wall-size fish tanks, encrusted with marble, glowing with the light of a thousand crystal chandeliers. The parking lots teem with double-parked Lexuses and the products of Mercedes-Benz. The priciest luxuries — sun-dried abalone, supreme shark's fin, the better grades of imported swallow's nest, bamboo pith and conpoy (dried scallop) — make the white-truffle dinners at Bastide or Valentino seem as inexpensive as breakfast at Rae's.

Yet even the most elegant of local Cantonese restaurants may express themselves best in the democracy of dim sum breakfasts — massive feasts, first-come, first-served where even the regulars pretend to check in and wait with the rest of us, where the impressive resources of the modern Cantonese kitchen are put to use producing dishes that may sell for no more than a buck and a half apiece, where ancient techniques of traditional cooking are harnessed to generate tasty and amusing snacks. If the unifying principle of Chinese cooking is undoubtedly harmony, dim sum breakfasts seem to be devoted to chaos. At maximum swell the seating capacity for Saturday dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley probably approaches that of a Lakers' game. And almost the moment a dim sum innovation pops up in Hong Kong — mobile gas-fired griddles, say, or scallop dumplings, or XO noodles, or pumpkin-size balls of glutinous rice stuffed with whole preserved eggs — it seems to make its way here.

I started to think a little differently about the dim sum process in New York, at a Hong Kong-style seafood restaurant that would get lost on an Alhambra street corner, but passes for the Chez Panisse of Manhattan's Chinatown. On a particularly crowded weekend morning, our party was directed to share a large table commanded by an elderly Chinese couple, who promptly left the restaurant in disgust. They had just settled down apparently; they hadn't yet bothered to order. But where I had been accustomed to seeing little dishes of Chinese mustard, they had been served ramekins of XO sauce, the expensive, spicy dried-fish condiment often seen on better Hong Kong tables. Instead of the usual wet-cardboard restaurant tea, there was a pot of pungent, smoky pu-erh, whose strong flavor punches through dim sum's rich sweetness like a nail gun through Sheetrock. I accidentally insisted on an order of pig's blood (the woman pushing the cart refused even to lift the lid to show us the dish), soft, custardy cubes that turned out to be the single best thing I ever tasted at the restaurant, which I had always associated with the sweet, rather thick batter that the chef used to blanket practically everything he fried.

And I realized — sometimes to get the best meal even at a dim sum house, where friendly pointing and waving seem to be the order of the day, you have to be proactive to be the kind of guy who insists on being told the contents of the crock you are assuredly not being shown, who insists on a particular kind of tea, and angles for the chicken feet so assiduously that the manager eventually brings over a fresh steamerful herself. If a beguiling cart hunkers by without slowing down, it is permissible to follow it around the room. Those little stand-up menus on the middle of the table? You are entitled to any dish thereon, and if you look around the room, you will find that most of the tables contain at least one of the specialties, usually menu dishes or discounted seafood, listed on the inside of the card. The waiters aren't there just to tally the check at the end — they are there to work with you, to help you get the best meal the restaurant is capable of providing. Don't skimp on the tip.