If we're in a recession, someone forgot to tell the Chinese.
Yesterday, the dim sum crowd at New Capital in Rowland Heights was as crazy as always. Judging by the number of people milling about outside waiting for a table, this go-to place for dim sum in the eastern part of San Gabriel Valley is as good as recession-proof.
The going rate for all dim sum plates on weekends is now $2.39. Two years ago it was just $1.98. But everything is as good as I remembered from my last visit.
Dim sum seems just the right kind of food for Sunday's gloomy weather. And tea, the perfect drink.
I had a slightly funky fish maw soup, fried things, steamed things, silky sheets of rice noodle blanketing shrimp, and more pork fat than I probably would intake in a typical American breakfast of bacon and eggs.
For dessert, it was mango pudding that actually tastes like mango, drizzled with a stream of canned evaporated milk.
You, too, can see the dim sum restaurant that the recession forgot by traversing just north of the O.C. border to Rowland Heights, the closest Chinese community to Orange County.
And I plan to chronicle other sites like it in posts like this, the first in an occasional series I'm calling “Out-of-County Experience”.
New Capital Seafood Restaurant,(626) 581-9813, 1330 Fullerton Rd., Rowland Heights
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.