From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published May 7, 2007 Royal China 2$ Metairie: 600 Veterans Blvd. 831-9633 Lunch and dinner Tues.-Sun. AE DC DS MC V Chinese. Dim Sum. Dim sum means "warm the heart." And it's cute: little tidbits of this and that, almost like tapas. Think of ordering nothing but appetizers from a Chinese menu, but with ten times the number of selections, and you have dim sum. In China, dim sum is a kind of tea snack, eaten in the daylight hours. But in cities with large communities of Chinese restaurants (San Francisco, most notably), restaurants specializing in dim sum are a major part of the dining scene. Only a few restaurants have ever offered dim sum in New Orleans; most gave it up after awhile. The Royal China has served it longest and best, and has a well-established clientele for dim sum. The Royal China doesn't push carts of dim sum around the dining room the way they do in San Francisco. Instead, there's a checklist that looks like a sushi menu. Many items on it are very familiar (crab-stuffed wontons, fried dumplings, spring rolls, chicken wings); others are offbeat or even bizarre (fried bean curd, chicken feet, tripe). Most are pretty good; some require Chinese parents for you to understand. They provide a card showing pictures of all the dim sum, but the photos are so small they don't help much. However, there's Shirley Lee. She and her chef husband Teng--both Hong Kong natives--own the restaurant. She's always in the dining room, moving from table to table conversing with the regulars, and treating newcomers as if they were regulars. She is very quick to explain anything you want to know, and will continue to field your questions and make recommendations as long as you want her to. She's the Chinese mother you never had. Among her more familiar bits of advice is what Sheriff Harry Lee--a regular--likes to eat. A many-course dim sum feast at Royal China can be terrific. They make everything in-house, and the variety is fantastic. Here goes: Chunks of duck meat on the bone, very tender and with a little fatty skin. Crab wontons, almost too hot to eat when they came out. Shu mai--round steamed dumplings stuffed with pork and shrimp. The tripe, which looked very different from any I ever had, with a much milder taste. And beef dumplings, wrapped with thin pasta. "Paper shrimp"--a few shrimp wrapped in rice paper and fried. Fried, sesame-topped dried tofu, with the texture of shrimp. Soft, bready steamed buns filled with chunky barbecue pork. Salt-and-pepper fried oysters, indeed very salty and very peppery. Duck meat cut into tiny dice and cooked with water chestnuts and a few other things, which one then wrapped in a lettuce leaf and ate with the fingers. That's what I remember, and I only had this meal yesterday. I think there may have been a couple of other items on there. Obviously, this is the kind of meal that's best enjoyed with six or eight people--and there were quite a few tables of that size doing exactly that. The Royal China also serves from a more conventional Chinese menu. But even this is much more wide-ranging than most these days, with some very adventuresome food. The service is a little more ethnic, too. When you order soup here, they often serve you a bowl big enough to split at least two ways. The hot-and-sour soup, for example, is a meal in itself if you down the entire thing. And a good one at that. They have a few dishes here I've seen nowhere else. At least not lately. For example, I found a dish I've not had in perhaps twenty years: Yu-Shiang pork, an extremely spicy concoction of julienne pork, cabbage, and a few other vegetables. It was delicious, but made me break out into a sweat, and worry about the consequences tomorrow of having eating it. The chef is not shy about making strong statements if he thinks the eater is adventuresome. There is a whole range of dishes that fall under that salt-and-pepper style I mentioned earlier. On a previous visit, the entree was salt-and-pepper squid. I ordered it only after ascertaining that this was not the giant squid the sushi bars use. (That stuff is cut into rectangles and scored heavily, but it remains daunting to chew.) What came out was like a tempura-battered squid, fresh and good, seasoned with jalapeno peppers (in a Chinese restaurant? Hmm). I used all the other sauces on the table with it, and liked it until it got cold. That was inevitable, because there was enough here for two people. If this sounds like a restaurant that specializes in spicy cooking, it is. But they do the milder dishes, too. One night I had a nice version of moo shu pork, served beautifully and well. That long card includes all the familiar Cantonese dishes, the fried rice, and all that stuff. However, it would be a shame for those with curious palates to order that stuff. All Shirley needs is a hint that you're willing to expose yourself to something new, and she'll start offering dishes not on the menu. The most exotic such item was marinated but uncooked blue crab in the shell. That was a first for me. The raw, glistening crabmeat was actually sweet to the taste, contrasting with the slightly acid, oily marinade. On other evenings I've had snow pea shoots braised with garlic and other unusual vegetables. All this is as good as it is unfamiliar. Although a renovation a few years ago made the restaurant more comfortable, the atmosphere is minimal. They've wrested a lot of business out of this 35-year-old former fast-food chicken shack. But the prices are low, the cooking is exciting, and the owners are eager to please. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.