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“This is the way we are working hard to survive and to support our community,” Tan said. Maybe most excitingly, larger dim sum orders - as in multiple orders of the same type of dim sum - can be ordered raw, owner Qing Tan said, which customers can take home and steam up fresh themselves or pack in the freezer for later. The Southeast Division restaurant’s dim sum, which favors direct delivery from the kitchen over carts, is available nearly in full, with only a couple items like taro and radish cakes unavailable. Pure Spice has jumped on Uber Eats, Postmates, and GrubHub, as well as offering takeout from the restaurant itself.

While some spots, like Wong’s King, have closed entirely, three dim sum restaurants - Ocean City Seafood Restaurant, Pure Spice and HK Cafe - have switched over to the only models they can to try and ride out the closures and bring a semblance of normalcy to the community: takeout and delivery. It’s a tradition, now on hiatus, that’s created a vacuum for many in the community. But dim sum is inherently an on-site dining meal, as many of the city’s biggest dim sum houses deliver fresh-steamed dumplings, thick bowls of congee, and fried snacks from those stainless steel carts. Brown announced a statewide shutdown of all on-site dining, restaurants across the Portland area have scrambled to reorganize their business models to stay afloat. It’s often the one meal of the week or month where entire families or big groups of friends would eat together, the meal itself less the centerpiece and more the vehicle to bring us together. Like for many other Chinese people across the world, dim sum isn’t just about the meal it’s the experience. I traded in carts for ordering straight from the kitchen and never ate in groups big enough to try everything I wanted, but I still found glimpses of my childhood dim sum experience here that brought me comfort: big, multigenerational tables of Chinese families, and small groups of elders hugging hot cups of tea alongside a few baskets of shu mai.ĭim sum is special.

I’d sit, wide-eyed, eagerly awaiting the stainless steel carts to make their way to our table and for my grandparents to order glistening, oil-slicked towers of har gow-siu mai and a plate of jin doi just for me.Īs I got older and moved to Portland, I still found solace in those greasy metal steamer baskets. Often, my grandparents would run into old friends who still lived in the neighborhood they had settled into when they first came to America. My mom, uncle, and grandparents would loudly chatter in Chinese over the din and the rushing clatter of plates and chopsticks being set up for the next table. As a kid, I loved the loud, frenetic energy of my family’s weekly trip to Chicago’s Chinatown for dim sum.