Oriental East
Actual date: August 14, 2009
Sorry for the lull in posts. See, the version 2.5 update of Lightroom came out, allowing me to process all my RAW E-P1 files instead of relying on the JPEGs, and firmware updates came out for the E-P1 and lenses supposedly improving autofocus performance that I had to test, and… Ok, so all of that is true but not at all the reason for the lack of posts. Laziness is, as usual. Plus the English Premier League and college football seasons have started up in earnest, and I have to dedicate my customary hours to making sure I fulfill my man duty to know as much as possible about sports, especially the ones I claim to follow, but even those that I don’t.
In my semi-defense, this post is a doozy as I’m going to totally and utterly geek out about this dim sum, so that and my natural laziness combined and reacted to form an impenetrable wall of dread and reluctance to post, which I’ve only now been able to overcome. Warning to all: if you don’t care about food just skip this one, as it’s a total food fest and will be quite the long post to boot.
We got Day 3 of our D.C. trip started off with a bang. Susie was able to take the day off, so we purposefully got a late start to our day in order to go straight to have dim sum at Oriental East. For the uninitiated, dim sum is a sub-genre of Chinese food typically eaten for breakfast or brunch, consisting of small portions of food meant to be shared with family and/or friends. Most common dishes in dim sum are dumpling-type dishes, but there are other types of dishes too such as rice, congee (rice porridge), buns, etc. This is a terrific way to sample a multitude of dishes because of the small portions. Think of it as Chinese tapas.
We had dim sum a couple times on our 2005 trip to D.C., and this time we only planned to have it once so it had to be good. Oriental East fit the bill in terms of quality, variety, and availability–they are one of the rare places that serve dim sum every day instead of just on weekends, and since our Saturday was already booked we needed a weekday place.
Among the things I miss most about Indonesia is the food, and among the food types I miss most dim sum is definitely up there. Here in the Deep South there are few (no?) dim sum options. To my knowledge there isn’t a dim sum restaurant anywhere in Mississippi, although I’d be ecstatic to be wrong about that. Texas isn’t the Deep South, but that’s probably the closest dim sum you’ll find around here (Dallas), but again I’d love to be wrong if you know otherwise.
But enough lamenting; time to relive the joy of our dim sum outing. Let’s get down to business.
The almost full spread
This is as close to a shot of the full spread as I have. At least one, maybe two dishes have already been removed from the table because we had already divvied up the dishes they held. Here’s the full gore, dish-by-dish rundown of what we had:
Rice Noodle Crepe with Shrimp
This is rice noodle crepe stuffed with shrimp. “Crepe” merely describes its appearance in more Western-friendly terms, but that’s where the similarity ends. The “crepe” is more of a chewy noodle consistency, which is really what it is. You can see some greenery poking out of one, which is probably green onion since that’s a common ingredient in many Chinese dishes. The sauce is a light soy sauce. If we had room for any more food than we had ordered, we would’ve gotten more of this. Each of us might’ve had different personal favorites, but this was a universal favorite that scored high on all of our scoring charts.
Sweet Rice with Chinese Sausage
Like most English-translated Chinese dish names, the contents of this dish are obvious from the name. Sweet Rice with Chinese Sausage contains (surprise!) sweet rice and Chinese sausage. The Chinese sausage are the dark red bits in the picture, and have a sweet taste. Also pictured is the ubiquitous green onion.
Crispy Shrimp Balls
Yes, they’re called Crispy Shrimp Balls. You can stop snickering now. Basically a meatball made out of shrimp, deep fried. Can be enjoyed with a sweet and sour sauce on the side.
Beef Tripe in Black Bean Sauce
This one was for me–the freaky eater of the family (although I will never be nor would I ever want to be at the level of, say, Andrew Zimmern). Beef Tripe in Black Bean Sauce is pretty self-explanatory. Spicy dish, exactly how I like it. Denise was up for trying some, but the spiciness of it was too much for her. Don’t worry–we’ll get you into some tripe one of these days! This dish wasn’t quite up to my expectations. The tripe was a bit too soft; I expected a bit more chewiness/texture to it. I think they might have cooked it down too much for my liking, which might be how the dish is supposed to be but not how I hoped it would be.
Green Leek Sprout with Shrimp Paste
Denise ordered this thinking it would be more vegetable-y than it was. It was basically another shrimp dumpling with a bit of green leek sprout mixed in. Not bad, but not what we expected.
Steamed Roast Pork Buns
One of our favorite food memories of our Indonesia Trip 2009 was having Steamed Roast Pork Buns at the Singapore Airport, which in my tired daze during the traveling I didn’t think to take pics of. Well here’s roughly what they looked like.
Steamed Roast Pork Bun split open
Fluffy, sweet bread wrapped around a core of Twice-Cooked Pork. Twice-Cooked Pork is the pork your local Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurant uses in their Pork Fried Rice, except 10 times as good. The real stuff is tender and moist instead of hard and dry like the cheap stuff, and for these buns are further coated with sauce. These ones were good, although not as good as the ones we had in Singapore at both the airport and the hotel. Before the trip and before I realized just how long it took to travel around D.C., I had ambitiously planned for us to also buy some buns to go and take them back to Susie’s before heading out to the see the sights. Due to time constraints we axed that plan, but if not for our itinerary we would’ve brought home a few of these to enjoy for breakfast the following days.
Oriental East also have a baked version of this where the outside is a glistening, golden brown. We didn’t try those, but on the evidence of the steamed ones I assume the baked ones are just as good.
Phoenix Feet in Black Bean Sauce
“Phoenix” is a euphemism for “chicken”. Yes, chicken feet. Gross? I used to think so too, until curiosity got the better of me during our Indonesia trip and I ended up liking it. This is one of my mom’s favorite dim sum dishes, so the persistent presence of this dish at every dim sum outing we ever went on had apparently left an indelible memory in my mind subtly beckoning for me to try it. I really liked the version I had in Indonesia. This version at Oriental East I wasn’t as crazy about. As with the tripe it seemed too soft and cooked down. Spicy, which was nice. To further drive away those of you already turned off by the idea of eating chicken feet, it’s basically skin and cartilage. To me the texture is part of the enjoyment, so when it’s cooked down to the point of being too soft I feel it loses some of its charm.
When you check out Oriental East’s dim sum photo gallery, you’ll notice that tripe and chicken feet are 2 of the dishes not pictured. Probably a wise choice. Nobody wants to see that trash in pictures.
Sofia eating chicken feet
We tried to get Sofia to mug for the camera and pretend to eat chicken feet, but she didn’t quite grasp the concept and ended up taking a couple of real bites instead. Of course she complained that it was too spicy, but I’m confident that one day she will follow in the proud Pamudji tradition of nibbling skin and cartilage off of tiny chicken feet bones.
Steamed Shrimp Dumpling (Har Gao)
Back to more family-friendly fare. Har Gao is a bonafide dim sum classic. Some people go so far as to say that the Har Gao a restaurant serves up is a good barometer of how good the rest of their food will be. It’s quite simple–shrimp wrapped in dumpling wrapper and steamed. Theirs was excellent.
As with many other dim sum dishes, the Har Gao comes in a steamer rack. Some restaurants have their waiters push around carts full of stacks of these, and you just point at what you want. Oriental East might do this on the weekends (not sure), but I think they do regular ordering instead of the carts on weekdays because they don’t do enough dim sum volume to justify the carts.
Shiu Mai
Shiu Mai are shrimp and pork dumplings, usually with a bit of chopped carrot on top for color. My mom makes some killer Shiu Mai, so it’s a bit unfair to compare these to them. Let’s just say that they tasted good and would satisfy anybody not already spoiled by having grown up with better. Good stuff anyway; I was happy with them.
Sesame Balls
This one isn’t self-explanatory like the others. True, the outside is coated with sesame seeds, but the inside is actually filled not with sesame but with sweet bean paste. The balls are deep fried resulting in an excellent sweet and savory flavor combo. This was one of Denise’s favorites.
Sweet Rice in Lotus Leaves with Meat
The name of the dish leaves the exact meat a mystery, but after cracking open the outer layer of rice we discovered it was beef.
Sweet Rice with Meat innards
Beef? Maybe it was pork? Serves me right for waiting so long to write this post. That reddish-brown chunk is Chinese sausage which is pork, so maybe the other meat was pork too. In any case it was delicious. But don’t eat the leaves.
Happy eaters
Susie also ordered some congee but they were out. How can you be out of rice porridge?! Oh well, can’t complain too much as we were stuffed and the rest of the meal was excellent. Even taking into account the few relative weak spots which the typical diner won’t partake in anyway (tripe and chicken feet), this dim sum meal was an all-around success. 2 visits 4 years apart, and quality was just as good this time as 4 years ago. As long as they keep serving dim sum they’ll be our go-to place for dim sum every time we visit D.C. At roughly $2.50 per dish, if you’re looking to feed a few people you just can’t go wrong with dim sum at Oriental East. Or if you’re a pig like me you could just go alone and stuff your face. I could probably down, oh, 4, maybe 5 dishes by myself. $10-$12.50 total–I can live with that. Maybe it’s a good thing after all that we don’t live anywhere near a dim sum restaurant.
Oriental East
1312 East-West Highway
Silver Spring, MD 20910
(301) 608-0030
A very short walk from the Silver Spring Metro stop on the Red line.
Sun – Thu: 11a – 10p
Fri – Sat: 11a – 11p
Dim Sum: every day, 11a – 3p (very nice!)
[...] that tattooed on me somewhere. For reference on what these sesame balls look like, refer to the D.C. dim sum post. These were practically the same as the sesame balls we had there except smaller. These are [...]