There are a ton of dumpling restaurants in the Bay Area, but we purposefully kept off the places that weren’t specifically Cantonese dim sum spots. Balancing out the banquet halls are the low-key counter-service spots, where the staff preside over enormous steamers full of lotus leaf-wrapped sticky rice and fluffy char siu bao.Īssociate critic Cesar Hernandez and I visited a wide span of dim sum places throughout the Bay Area - about 50 places - for this list, comparing the execution of basic items like shumai and cheong fun while exploring the house specialities.
The nation’s oldest dim sum restaurant, Hang Ah Tea Room, has been operating in San Francisco’s Chinatown since 1920 and just blocks away are boundary-pushing newcomers like Palette Tea House and Osmanthus Dim Sum Lounge, where you can pair your shumai with high-end whiskey. With a long-established history of immigration from China’s Guangdong province, the Bay Area has Cantonese culture and cuisine imprinted onto its DNA.
