Got takeout again from Winsor yesterday. Many of our old favorites sang as mellifluously as before: steamed shrimp dumplings, both the version with chives and the one with spinach, the always-superb deep fried shrimp and chive dumplings (got 3 orders, one for each of us, that’s how much we love 'em – but see NOTE below), the steamed chicken buns, and the sticky rice in lotus leaf. The Chau Chow pork dumplings, though, were still filled with lovely, crunchy water chestnuts, peanuts and the like, but the pork was hard to find. [This sort of cost-cutting is now pretty common: The Forage Wine dinners I’ve praised elsewhere are now increasingly low on meat.]
New to us this time were the steamed sticky-rice rolls: a visually curious cylinder of beige sticky rice steamed in a white dough wrapper. But the rice sang (I’m on a musical kick here – just be grateful that I don’t start singing) with flavors: 5 spice, perhaps tiny traces of Sichuan peppercorn, and even tinier flecks of dried pork. It made for quite a chorus in the mouth.
I also got the beef lo mein: thin noodles in a tasty, scalliony sauce, with slices of beef (not the usual strings) with a tenderness far better than they have any right to have in an “ordinary” dish such as this.
Cost for all this: $67 (before tip). We got 3 meals out of it yesterday, and enough left over for two more tonight.
(Comparisons are odious, and all, but Pagu had a rarified dim sum brunch yesterday at $60 a pop, only available initially to AmEx Gold Card members on Resy. Hard to believe that the food would have been any better, at four to five times the cost – but, yes, I understand ambience and the like.)
NOTE: Like all fried things, these fried shrimp&chive triangles are best eaten right away before they are entombed in styrofoam (@digga alert!). But if you must takeout, as I still must, grab the order as soon as it is ready, rush it to your car --parked just outside (I had to circle thrice to get that spot) – find the correct container in the bag, and eat two immediately to capture their full, glorious crisposity (hey, if “crispy” has now become the preferred word over the simpler “crisp”, I make a plea for “crisposity”). Then take the rest home to your wife and daughter. (But, they do re-crisp well on a nonstick griddle.)
