Dim sum is one of the most delicious and creative categories of Asian food. Most dimsum dishes need to be executed with great attention to detail and high-level of technical skills to produce the wide variety of textures and flavors.
In the West, steamed soup dumplings and Peking Duck may gets lumped onto the menu of a dim sum restaurant but, in Asia, soup dumplings, peking duck and dim sum are usually found in its own specialized restaurant (for example, Din Tai Fung 鼎泰豐 for its steamed soup dumplings, and Quan Ju De 全聚德 for peking duck).
Dim Sum comes out of Hong Kong/Canton and is traditionally enjoyed with a pot of tea (choices usually include Jasmine Black, Chrysanthemum, or Pu'er tea) while catching on gossip with friends or reading the morning newspaper. Thus dim dum or 點心 which can mean both a snack (think "tapas") or "a touch to the heart" is also called 飲茶, which translates into "drinking tea". Sou
See below for some of my favorite dishes:
Dim sum, like tapas, are on the pricier side of Chinese food but mainly due to the use of seafood and all the labor needed to make the dumpling skins just right, roll the ingredients into thin skins, then deep fry or steam (not to mention that many of the items have multilayered skins). In addition, all the items (unlike croissants) need to be kept fresh and hot, but never overcooked. This is probably also why you don't usually have dim sum served all day unless the restaurant is just heating up frozen items. So check with the restaurant to make sure that they will be serving dim sum when you plan to visit (most places switch back to stir fry/traditional Chinese food menus after 2PM).
As you might know from experience, Dim Sum is most fun with a group of people so you can order a lot of different dishes and sample everything. Over time and the spread of the dim sum tradition, different regions of Asia have added its own regional favorites to dim sum menus like the Beijing Pearl Rice Meat Balls, Malay Steamed Sponge Cake, an Sweet Tofu Soup. I will continue to collect an encyclopedia of dim sum in the gallery above so check back to see which ones you haven't tried yet!
