You know how some restaurants don’t seem to have an identity? You know, like Jack in the Box but in full restaurant form. Well, Sun Penang in Squirrel Hill is one of those restaurants. The only identity it really has is “Asian,” but Asian covers a lot of groups and so does Sun Penang. From Thai to Dim Sum to Malaysian, it is a hard place to choose a meal, but choose I did.

For some reason I was feeling the Thai part of the menu and ordered myself some Curry Chicken with Potato and my wife felt more Chinese and went with Beef and Broccoli. My curry was of the red variety and also came with cilantro, while her dish came with exactly what it said it came with, but she had them add water chestnuts, which I find much more acceptable than broccoli.

The result? Maybe it’s better to stick to one thing and do it well. While the dishes were certainly beautiful, they seriously lacked in flavor. This is not to say that they tasted bad. In fact, there can be nothing negative said about the flavor because it really wasn’t there. Perhaps we were there on an off day, but the name of the game on that day was bland and with so many other options in the area, bland isn’t something worth returning to.

Chinatowns are an interesting phenomenon. And not so much in the fact that a group of people from a country showed up to a new country and settled in one area, but in the way that they no longer really seem to be representative of China. Case in point: while in Vancouver, I knew there was good Chinese to be found, and rather than point me to Chinatown, my hotel pointed me to Richmond, which he called real Chinatown. By real, he meant that the Chinatown on the map was simply no longer authentic, if it ever was. By recommendation, we went to a place called Rainflower to devour dim sum before undertaking the long drive to Jasper.

As opposed to the dim sum I have grown used to, Rainflower took more of a dumpling house tactic of letting the customers mark off their desired dishes on a checklist. This was a nice change from the often-overwhelming carts being pushed around by people who seem disappointed every time I pass on an option.

Despite this difference, Rainflower’s food wasn’t really any different from any dim sum I have had before. Tasty shrimp, flavorful pork, custard tarts and rice noodles all rang true, plus I was pleased to see xiaolongbao included in the offerings. Being one of my favorite Chinese dishes, it seemed that Rainflower knew how to make me happy. It wasn’t my favorite xiaolongbao, but it sure was a nice addition.

Now, I must say that as happy as I was with the typical dim sum I had at Rainflower, I couldn’t help but think Vancouver could offer me something better. It had satisfied my hunger, but with such a great Chinese population and easy access to Asia and the oceans, I had some lofty expectations and while Rainflower met the lowest of expectations, I would like to wager that something better is out there.

It seems like going to China without eating dim sum is on par with going to Italy and not eating pasta. But in truth, dim sum is really a specialty of Hong Kong and Guangdong (formerly known as Canton). Fortunately, in this day and age, you can find Cantonese restaurants all over China. In Xi’an, we found a place called Star Ferry near the Bell Tower. The interior of the restaurant was decorated like a boat, and I later found out that it was named for a ferry company operating in Hong Kong.

Their menu was pretty massive and since it was breakfast nothing really tickled my fancy until I found the dim sum in the back. Since dim sum often involves meat, shrimp and other savory things, many people are surprised to find that it is a breakfast food, but breakfast it is. Since I was eating the dim sum alone, I only chose two dishes: Chinese Egg Tarts and BBQ Pork Buns. Since both were already cooked, they came out immediately.

First I went for the egg tarts. The egg tarts are similar to Portuguese egg tarts and my guess is they came to Hong Kong through Macau (which was a Portuguese colony until 1999). The eggy part is pretty much a sweet custard and tastes delicious. The crust is flaky, but not so flaky that it falls apart when you bite in. Then came the pork buns. They were served in the same steamer they had been cooked in and tasted pretty good. The BBQ sauce was really sweet and make the buns more of a sweet breakfast than the savory one I had sort of been expecting.

While both parts of my breakfast tasted good, they didn’t exactly blow me away. In fact, I kind of felt like they had been prepackaged good that were just reheated to serve. Nonetheless, it was good to have some dim sum and it certainly wasn’t a bad meal by any means.

In the old Chinatown of downtown LA, there is a massive restaurant called the Empress Pavillion. The restaurant consists of a giant ballroom filled with chairs and tables.

In the mornings, the room becomes packed with hundreds of Chinese and westerners alike, all clamoring for a taste of the dim sum. Chinese women (whose command of the English language varies from non-existent to mediocre) push carts of plates around with varying dishes. If something on the cart looks good, you stop the lady, point to the food and she sets it on your table. Afterward, she takes out a stamp and presses it somewhere on the card on your table. You look to see where she stamped, but can’t really tell what anything means because it is all written in Chinese. Luckily, I can read some Chinese, and

determined that the stamps go in different sections, meaning small, medium and large. There are more complex symbols, but at least those make some sense to me. Through this mysterious stamping system, they are able to determine how much you owe.

It’s important to get a big variety of foods, so as soon as we sat down and had our tea poured for us, we started pointing at carts that didn’t have vegetables, of which there were a decent amount. One of the dishes looked like a combination between octopus and a breakfast pastry. It turned out to be some sort of rice noodles covered in soy

sauce and was a pretty good way to start out. Along the way we also acquired some bubble tea (boba tea), which is a sweetened black tea with cream and tapioca balls. It’s a great companion to any dim sum meal.

Next came a plethora of small dishes. Shrimp pot stickers, pork shui mai, sticky rice in a lotus leaf (don’t worry, I didn’t eat the leaf), beef meatballs, and some sort of roll-like thing filled with and indistiguishable meat. All of

these were pretty good, but the pot stickers were my favorite of the bunch. The most disappointing were the meatballs, which had been stuffed with some sort of green vegetable. Obviously, due to all the food being pushed around on carts, it was impossible to get an special orders.

To finish the meal off, we got the best of all dim sum desserts, sesame balls. These are fried little dumplings with sesame seeds on the outside and a sweet center. The beauty of them is that as good as they are, your body can really only handle eating one. It is the perfect way to finish off a morning of dim sum.