Saturday 9 November 2013

Wing Tai



I work in retail so this time of year is getting busier and busier and spending any time out of the office is a real treat.  We dedicated this afternoon to visiting a couple of our local big stores to see what the products we spend so much time trying to deliver look like in real life and to also just spend a little time together as a team.  Oh, and the stores just happened to be close to Wing Yip...

While I'm happy to spend hours geeking out in stores looking at and talking about the latest Android tablets, I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking about the other part of my afternoon - food!
Remember I went to Wing Yip about 2 months ago?  Well in Wing Yip you can also find Wing Tai restaurant which has an amazing menu for standard main course, noodles and rice dishes but our goal today was to sample the dim sum menu.  

We arrived late for lunch but early for dinner so as you would expect, it wasn't that busy. The restaurant was spacious and had hints of red and gold throughout - I loved the small red lanterns dotted about the place (and need to get one or two for myself!)

There is an entire menu full of delicious sounding dishes but we were on a mission to eat as much dim sum as possible - 95 options?  No problem!  There was what looked like some kind of score card on the table for ordering the dim sum - luckily my colleague had already looked at the menu a few days before and had a few dishes for us to try so he ticked the boxes pretty quickly.





We all had a look through the menu which was very easy to navigate as it is arranged by types of dim sum and has a picture of exactly what you will get.

A few more ticks on the request sheet and we sat patiently waiting while sipping on complimentary cups of jasmine tea.




We didn't have to wait long before the first few plates came out.  I loved how we were served a few dishes at a time so we could spend time enjoying the flavours of each dish before trying the next and didn't feel rushed to move on to the next one at all.

We left having eaten our way through 17 plates of food.   Think tapas but better!  We did duplicate a few things because we liked them so much but most were a one off and all delicious!




Beef Cheung Fun - a rice noodle roll filled with beef.  It was a little difficult to tackle with the chopsticks because the rice noodle part was quite soft and the insides kept trying to escape.  It was a lovely start to the meal though - soft rice noodle outside with a tasty, smooth beef inside.  The sauce it came with was mostly soy but with a little rice wine vinegar I think.




Vietnamese spring rolls - a crispy shell with meaty innards (pork and spring onion, I think) - these were my favourite things from the whole meal!  They came with a lovely tangy sauce which I think must have been rice wine vinegar with a little chilli.




Crispy Meat Croquette - basically a puffed up ball with a meat filling.  The outer part was lovely and crispy but once cut into the middle was a little too soft and the filling (pork) didn't fill too much of the inside.




Deep fried seafood dumplings - the first thing I noticed about these was the bright colour and how beautiful they looked!  Crispy shells encasing a pork and shrimp filling...I'm not a big fan of prawns at all (it's a texture thing) and did manage to eat a whole dumpling but not one I would go back to even though crispy dumplings are pretty awesome!  They were served with a sauce that is a cross between salad cream and mayonnaise.




Char Sui BBQ Roast Pork Buns - amazing, just amazing.  You can actually get smaller versions of these from Waitrose (the only type I've ever had before) but the real thing is so lovely.  Imagine eating a cloud...pretty good, right?  Now imagine that cloud being full of tender BBQ pork.  I think that says it all!




Steamed Shanghai Dumplings - I was warned not to eat these while they were too hot and to also eat them in one go as they are quite juicy.  I waited for one to cool down, I ate it in one go, I wasn't impressed.  A little meaty but not the flavour explosion in my mouth that I was expecting!




Some kind of prawn dumplings - I'm not a fan of prawns at all so took a picture because I liked how think the skin was then moved on to the next tasty (non-prawn) thing I could find...




Siu Mai - speaking of prawns, how about you hide some in something that looks prawn-free? These looked pretty safe to eat but then I took a bite only to find a chunk of prawn in the pork mixture.  The whole thing tasted nice enough with a hint of ginger and spring onion but the bits of prawn put me off another helping!




Beef dumplings - I'd say more like meatballs....there was a trace of a bean curd wrapped but they just looked and tasted like your average meatball.




Plain Cheung Fun - *I think*...These were rolls of rice flour that had some spring onions in but I couldn't really taste much else.  They were a little more firm that the first cheung fun - because they were fried rather than just steamed they were a little crispy on the outside and delicious!  Again, they came on top of a lovely sauce that I think was a little soy sauce with vinegar.




Vegetarian bean curd rolls.  Not at all what I was expecting - I thought they would be the soft and slightly sweet tofu wrapper you sometimes get with sushi.  These were more like a crispy spring roll using a sheet of dried tofu instead of a spring roll wrapper.  I'm not complaining though - they were perfectly crisp with a lovely mushroom filling that went beautifully with the sweet chilli sauce you can see to the left of the spring rolls (I had to buy a bottle after trying it because I loved it so much!)




Crispy roast pork puff pastry - imagine if sausage rolls hooked up with the char sui buns from earlier...this is what you would get.  Warm, a little crisp and slightly flaky pastry filled with sweet BBQ pork.  Delicious but I have to admit I preferred the steamed buns!

I didn't manage to get a photo of a couple of the items we ordered because of the gannets I was sitting with - the food was snatched up within seconds!  There were also quite a few things we didn't order today although I am always up for trying new things so would never rule them out - duck tongue, beef honeycomb (tripe) and chicken claws.  Maybe next time...


Unit 2
395 Edgeware Road
London
NW2 6LN

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