Fat Kid Adventure #109: Pan Tao Restaurant (Cupertino)

One of 3 dim sum joints in Cupertino that I have visited, Pan Tao serves up dim sum and seafood to a medium-sized crowd. Today the focus was on Elise Tran whose birthday was yesterday, so Rar and I treated Elise and Tony out to a dim summy (or as I would sometimes say dim-a-lot) Sunday morning. Since we were on no red meat diet for Lent, we mostly chomped down on seafood goodness. The dim sum was pretty good, but Koi Palace in Daly City still takes the cake.

We had shrimp dumplings, shrimp-scallop dumplings, shrimp/chives dumplings, chashu buns, shrimp fen-si, Chinese broccoli, giant crab croquettes, fried banana shrimp rolls, and some egg custards. Yeah so now having written all of that I realized that "seafood goodness" was really just shrimps. Everything tasted pretty good, my favorite was the giant crab croquettes - well breaded and generously fried on the outside and dungeoness crab goodness on the ins, but of course I can't turn down any dumplings with shrimp neither. But when Lent is over, I will go back and open up to the meat selections - I am always interested to see what weird snacks dim sum places have from different animals! So far the best are a bowl of pig blood cubes and a soup made of innards (think tripe, intestines, etc.). But for Pan Tao, I think the selection is quite large, especially on the weekends.

The service is as expected - the Chinese waitresses will yell and promote the dishes and it doesn't really matter if you understand their dialect. We actually asked one of the waitresses what this one item is, and she replied almost really defensively - "how the hell am I supposed to know, I ain't never had this!" Pretty hilarious. Anyway, that's like standard dim sum service, so whatever.

After our main dim sum session was over, we chatted and chatted and drank three to four pots of tea. It was very relaxing and done the way dim sum was to meant to be done. Ended up staying there for about 2 hours. Great start to my Sunday!

Happy [belated] Birthday to E-Tran!

http://www.yelp.com/biz/pan-tao-restaurant-sunnyvale

Culture Note on Dim Sum: Dim sum directly translates to "lightly touch the heart" and meaningfully translates to "snacks" (cuz they tickle the heart like hehehuhu) in Mandarin, and the activity of going to get dim sum is actually called "yang cha" in Mandarin, which directly translates to "nurturing tea" and just really means "drinking tea." So the point of dim sum is really to drink tea and have a buncha little goodies to accompany the tea to make it a more fun and relaxing experience. This is why all the plates are tapa style, with not many servings provided since everything is supposed to be snack-size.