TAIWANESE DIM SUM IN BROOKLINE

A few weeks Tom, Suemin and I were at Shabu Village eating dinner. During dinner, Tom figured out that he had worked with one of the owners while in college (over a decade ago) and they got to talking. She told us that they had started serving a traditional Taiwanese breakfast during the weekends, and we promised to return to try it out.

Now most of you call Taiwanese breakfast Taiwanese dim sum. Why? I don't know, but I'll go along with it. You know that my favorite spots are the ones in Belmont and Watertown, but they're always packed, and I have to drive farther to get to them. So I was pretty happy to hear that there was a closer one nearby. We invited Suemin, Huong and Harumi to join us and when we arrived at 11:30, the restaurant had just opened and was totally empty.

We were seated quickly, and Tom had a strawberry shake while we awaited the arrival of the rest of our party. Then I took over the ordering. Most of us weren't all that the hungry after the pizza party the previous evening, so I didn't order too much.

We started off with a plate of marinated cucumbers (which turned out to be far too sweet, I could make better ones at home)

And marinated seaweed. This one was good, with flavors of raw garlic and sesame oil.

And then the waiting started. I'm not sure why, since the restaurant was filled with employees and there weren't that many customers, but we would get one dish, and wait 10-15 minutes before the next dish arrived. This was especially strange because almost nothing there was made in house. (I'll explain later).

Continuing on, here's my order of chive pockets. They were pretty good, but they were much smaller than the chive pockets that I'm accustomed to, and you could tell they were not made fresh in house. They had been purchased frozen or premade.

After another wait, our "scallion pancake" arrived. These aren't the normal scallion pancakes that you get. I've had it before, but it's more like a scallion bread. And again, it was premade. You could buy an entire loaf at a grocery store. Sometimes my mom will get it at home. Plus the portion was tiny. After another wait, our orders of soup dumplings arrived. Now I was happy that these did look good and everyone seemed to enjoy them (Since I don't eat beef or pork, I didn't partake)

After we'd finished these, the waitress actually came out to apologize that they're portions were so small and asked if we wanted to order other stuff. Since we were still waiting for our soy milks and beef pockets, we turned her down. And like I said, we weren't that hungry anyway.

We did finally get our soy milks and for whatever unexplained reason, they waited until almost the end of the meal to get them to us. Normally, it's one of the first things served, so you can dip stuff into it. (but they didn't even have the traditional fried dough that you do dip)

The last thing to arrive (after another wait) was the beef in a sesame pocket. People enjoyed this one, too. But again, I have no idea why it took so long since the beef is served cold, so all you have to do it toast the sesame pocket.

So you can all tell that I wasn't a huge fan of Taiwanese dim sum at Shabu Village. First, it took way to long- over an hour and a half. I am a fan of their shabu, but they don't have a full kitchen and aren't equipped to serve freshly made foods. They're really much better at reheating. If I wanted to prepare Taiwanese dim sum at home, I could've come up with exactly what they'd served us. Even though Tom said he liked the convenience of having it so close to us, I'd still rather make the drive out to Belmont to get freshly made fried dough and scallion pancakes. I won't be back for the dim sum at Shabu Village, but I'll certainly be back for their shabu.