New Lake Pavilion
The secret to good dim sum is pretty simple.
I’m learning that part of growing up is watching childhood memories turn into exactly that: memories that will never come back to life again, doomed to dissolve into whatever else is going on inside my brain.
One such memory: a weekend dim sum ritual faded in and out of my family’s routine throughout my life. At its height, when I was in high school, my mother and I went to a yoga class every Sunday morning, followed by meeting up with my father at the now-closed dim sum restaurant Dynasty in the now-demolished mall in Cupertino, Calif. The closure of Dynasty and the fact that I’m not in high school anymore (thank god) mean that dim sum Sundays are a ritual of the past—gone forever are the red plush chairs and gold accent walls, and even if my family and I did go to another dim sum restaurant (we do sometimes), it just wouldn’t ever be… right.
And that’s alright. Because the other part of growing up is building your own life, your rituals and your people, and the fun of that is experiencing what was once familiar with different people. Like dim sum Sundays.
Over the weekend, prior to a sunny afternoon at Citi Field, my friends and I went to New Lake Pavilion for lunch. Viraj had been wanting to go there for a while after a video about it from Bon Appétit and a pre-planned trip to Flushing, Queens was the perfect opportunity. The restaurant is a little elusive online—I couldn’t find a website and it took some digging to find the Yelp page—but I did enjoy a 2013 Pete Wells review of the place, though he went for dinner. (Rookie move.)
IMO, an essential part of the dim sum dining experience is the carts of it all, which seem to have fallen out of favor after the pandemic. My guess is that it’s probably more economical for a restaurant to make food to order rather than having to guess at what people will want. But, I think part of the fun of dim sum is selecting dishes from the carts: getting talked into accepting way too much food and nominating members of the table to go physically chase down a cart across the restaurant when they roll out of the kitchen stacked with whatever dish you’ve been craving. Having an infinite supply of food constantly rolling past you, ripe for the picking? A meal fit for a king.
Due to the cart system, dim sum meals can fly by, and this weekend, we definitely went from way too hungry to way too full in too short of a time period. And yet, I couldn’t stop myself from continuing to pick at the food and entertain other options as they rolled by.
The fun of engaging in a family tradition with non-family members is seeing how they might engage in it differently, and in this case, everyone seemed to have a slightly different standard dim sum order. My non-negotiables: shrimp rice noodle rolls, tofu skin rolls, roast pork pastry puffs, har gow and siu mai, all of which were excellently prepared at New Lake Pavilion. (Although in retrospect I’m not sure if I ended up eating a har gow, which is disappointing.)
My additional guests at the table contributed char siu bolo baos, pineapple buns with roast pork inside, sheng jian bao, pan-fried buns and deep fried dumplings filled with chives and shrimp, all of which I probably wouldn’t have ordered on my own. New Lake Pavilion’s char siu bolo baos are incredible—so impressively pillowy soft and fluffy with a crunchy, sugary crust. I’m dying for one right now…
I found all of their dim sum offerings to be excellent, wonderfully nostalgic. However, besides the bolo baos, I was blown away by their egg tarts, which I loved growing up. The ones I remember eating weren’t anything too special, a miniature, uninteresting pastry crust filled with egg custard, in the most basic of ways. Good, as all egg tarts are, but nothing to write home about. But New Lake Pavilion takes their egg tarts seriously—even visually, you can tell by the intense lamination of the crust that your bite is going to crunch exquisitely and yes, you would be right about that.
Besides the novelty of cart dim sum, New Lake Pavilion’s dim sum is genuinely great and well worth the slight trek for me. But more than the food, going back again (and again) to what OMB is all about, the secret to good dim sum is really just the company you keep. Dim sum Sundays are for spending time surrounded by the love of those closest to you—even the best food can’t replace that.
Bite it!
The fun part about New Lake Pavilion is you should just show up, no reservations necessary. Great for planners and procrastinators alike!