How Good is Authentic Dim Sum In Taipei?

Dim sum is another one of those foods that I was really looking forward to having in Taiwan. I’ve always LOVED dim sum and have had it througout my life and was looking forward to see good it was in Taiwan.

I hadn’t run across any dim sum places through the first few days of my stay in Taipei but hadn’t exactly gone out of my way to find a place as I got acclimated to Taipei. I decided to stay in the Ximending district for a couple days and thought it would be a good time to have some dim sum.

Hung Kan Dim Sum

Luckily, there was a pretty highly rated dim sum restaurant in the area called Hung Kan Dim Sum. I stopped by later in the morning for brunch and was definitely reminded of dim sum / Chinese restaurants back in SoCal. The restaurant was on the second level and was a massive floor with a ton of round tables with lazy susan’s on them. It was nice to be around that familiarity, even in another country.

The menu was HUGE. There were multiple pages dedicated to just dim sum items and the more pages with more lunch / dinner items. I was tempted to get some non-dim sum stuff since it looked and sounded really good but I had to go with dim sum only this go around.

There was just so much to choose from, lol, it was hard for me to narrow it down. I wanted to try new things but also wanted to try old favorites back home to see how they stack up against dim sum in Taiwan. I ended up getting creamy egg yolk buns (120 NTD, $3.76 USD), steamed glutionous rice with chicken and abalone (130 NTD, $4.07 USD), and fried dumplings with pork and shrimp (105 NTD, $3.29 USD).

That’s the big drawback with traveling solo, I’m not able to get and try as much food as I’d like!

The Food

Creamy Egg Yolk Buns

Starting with the creamy egg yolk buns.

These things were super light. The dough was incredibly light and airy and the egg filling was a little runny and surprisingly sweet. I wasn’t expecting that sweetness, but it was a pleasant surprise. The yolk was more like custard in my opinion. These were really tasty overall. Even better when they were first brought out and nice and warm. Yum!

Sticky Rice

Next up was the steamed glutionous rice with chicken and abalone which, seemed to be a long-winded name for sticky rice wrapped in a lotus leaf. This was pretty much like the sticky rice I have at dim sum down in Southern California. It had a rich, savory flavor to it, and was extremely sticky (of course). The bits of chicken, abalone, and mushrooms in it was tasty, and they all went really well together. It didn’t necessarily stand out from the sticky rice that I get back home but it was definitely solid.

Fried Dumplings with Pork and Shrimp

These dumplings had a super hard exterior. Trying to pick one up with chopsticks was like trying to pick up an egg, lol. Which is fitting since these were egg shaped. That was the initial impression I got of them. Once I actually picked one up and took a bite, it was pretty solid. The fried dumpling definitely had a very crunchy exterior as you’d expect since they’re fried. The inside portion was nice and gooey.

The filling was lacking in this though. It was pretty tasty, there just wasn’t very much of it inside of them. It seemed like the dough to filling, ratio was heavily tilted to dough. It was hard to taste the filling with so much dough. These would have been quite good if there was some more filling in them.

Was There Any Difference In The Dim Sum?

I really couldn’t tell too much of a difference between the dim sum in Taipei than what I have in Southern California. Although there’s way more items on the menu and a lot of different items that I hadn’t seen before in Southern California. It would have been nice to try way more of the menu and experience some of those other items that I don’t really see here in Southern California. BUT the items I did have, were really good and I enjoyed them. They just didn’t necessarily floor me.