Welcome to The Best Thing We Ate This Week, winter 2022 edition. Most Fridays, we share a restaurant dish or two that really hit the spot in the past week. (Check out last season’s edition here.) Want to share your own favorites? Join our Facebook group to give and get recommendations for local dining.
Health experts consider dining out to be a high-risk activity for the unvaccinated; it may pose a risk for the vaccinated, especially in areas with substantial COVID transmission.
January 14: Dim sum, delivered
Dim sum from Ming’s Seafood
19 Pleasant St., Malden
There are few communal dining settings as fun as dim sum, sharing endless small plates — buns, dumplings, noodles, more — with friends. Like a lot of folks, I’m not really spending time in large groups and indoor dining settings at the moment, but of course I’m missing that feeling. Getting dim sum delivered isn’t quite the same — ok, it’s pretty much nothing like actually going out for dim sum — but it was a pleasant way to spend a weekend morning, something a little different from our usual at-home breakfasts and brunches, and it got me dreaming of the day I can order this spread again but in person.
Since I moved to the Malden-adjacent edge of Medford last year, I’ve been slowly making my way through quite a few incredible Malden dining options, and I’ve had several dim sum spots recommended to me, particularly Ming’s Seafood (which also has a Quincy location) and Sun Kong. This time around, we went with Ming’s Seafood; some photos had caught my eye on Instagram recently, and I was eager to give it a try.
We went all in on all things crispy and/or shrimp: steamed shrimp dumplings in jet-black cuttlefish wrappers, embellished with a bit of gold (photogenic, if that’s your thing, but also delicious); crispy shrimp in red rice rolls; and crispy shrimp rolls with celery. Salted egg yolk buns, turnip cake, and durian pie were also hits, and our one-year-old couldn’t get enough of the fish balls. (If you’re curious about durian but worried about its infamously pungent odor, try the durian pie; it’s an approachable dish for durian beginners, a flaky pastry stuffed with a lightly sweet, almost melon-like filling, and the smell isn’t anywhere near as strong as that of fresh durian.)
What’s your favorite dim sum dish? Have you bothered with doing dim sum for takeout/delivery, or is it all about the in-restaurant experience for you? Join our Facebook group to share your thoughts.
