We find dim sum places to be variable - perhaps inevitable these days. At any rate, DH and I went Fri 9/15 and were not impressed by Pacific Lighthouse.
Liked the lo bak ko and two different scallop dumplings, all three quite good.
DH likes sweet/salt more than I do, but he felt char siu bao was ridiculously sweet. It has a lot of gravy, which if you try it by itself is as sweet as any Smuckers jam you’ve ever eaten. He gave it thumb’s down.
Har gow and siu mai average. Potstickers were awful, tasted like they dumped leftover fillings from everything - pork, shrimp, beef, chicken - then gave it two quick turns in the wok and dumped it on a plate.
Steamed beef balls were light in texture but tasted like they were one-third grd chicken and two-third grd beef. I liked them whereas I don’t usually care for them. Hong Kong-born DH again did not approve.
Shrimp in rice noodle roll was awful as well. Bak fun was definitely thicker than usual, plus it was oversteamed so mushy and limp.
Spicy chow fun rolls…weren’t. Lacked soya and chiles, just bland and browned.
Steamed pork ribs were actually done properly: coated/marinated, dow see added, then steamed. Unfortunately two negatives: I loathe the cheapie cheat of sticking taro underneath to make it look like the little dish is full of pork when it really isn’t. And it wasn’t steamed long enough; almost but not quite, another 5-7 min would have done it but they didn’t.
Singapore chow mein had good flavor but char siu was in big shreds, not smaller slivers (it’s traditional to match the meat and noodle thicknesses more closely) and DH found the pork “hard as a rock”.
Shanghai XLB were juicy but not as flavorful as our fav places.
Overall: big menu, clearly aimed at Chinese families and special events. Noodles were decent so we might come back to try some of those dishes and maybe the scallop dumplings again.
Service: big thumb’s down. We have a bad tendency to be careless about reading the bill, but when we got home and checked it, it looked very suspiciously like they had charged us for an extra dish we did not order (I had written down what we had, for my Yelp rvws) that was in the higher-priced category.
Tea: we requested jasmine and got cheapo floor sweepings. Really mediocre quality.
Also: if you can’t speak Cantonese, don’t even bother asking the servers any questions. None of them spoke English. Ordering is done by marking menus; trays that came around only had a few items, like boiled chicken feet and roast duck, et.al.
