Ocean City

We love dim sum. We don't go very often because the lines/waits at so many places in NYC are horrendous. So when A's parents said we were going to dim sum straight from the airport, we had no complaints.

They took us to Ocean City Seafood Restaurant in Southeast Portland, which has dim sum from the roving carts. The carts kept coming and the plates kept landing on the table. We got all sorts of dumplings - shrimp, beef, pork and vegetables, and shrimp and chives. These were fairly standard dumpling renditions, and our favorite of these 4 was probably the shrimp and chives.

We also got curry chicken puffs (which tasted more like BBQ chicken pastries with not much curry), sticky rice (pretty good), chicken feet (good as always for A), peppers stuffed with shrimp cake (very tasty and M was very happy for some green vegetables), fried taro puffs (soft, stick to your ribs, and tasty), and eggplant (fine but nothing special).

And there was even more. Tofu pudding, egg tarts (fairly standard), shrimp rice rolls (also standard), and turnip cakes (always a favorite). A is always a fan of the tofu pudding as it's one of his favorite desserts. It came with the traditional ginger-sugar syrup-y soup. The nice thing about this soup was that it wasn't overly sweet like so many of them can be.

The dim sum was pretty good, but the brief taste of dim sum we had in Los Angeles earlier that year was still better (we are almost up to that in the LA recaps). Our best bets are probably SF, LA or Canada if we're looking for really delicious dim sum (outside of Asia).

We went back to Ocean City for a second dim sum meal later in the week with even more family members. Sadly our part of the group got held up at the gas station and arrived to a table full of partially eaten plates, so you will be deprived of close-up photos of most of the dishes we got. A lot of them were the same, except the majority of the dishes were beef and pork this time. There was also congee but we didn't get any of that, so can't comment on whether it was any good.

We did manage to get a few close-ups on the shrimp dumplings, taro cakes, fried sesame balls with lotus paste, and the pork buns.

Many of the dishes we got were similar to our first visit, except with meat instead. One dish that we got this time that we didn't get the first time that M really liked were the taro cakes. We ended up with both taro and turnip cakes on the table, which made us really happy.

We also got a plate of dry beef chow fun for the table, which was excellent. M is a big fan of chow fun and this is probably on par with some of the better ones she's had. Lots of scallions and bean sprouts, and the flavor was just right.

If we were to pick our three favorite things that we ate during our 2 meals at Ocean City, they would be:

For A - taro puff, chicken feet, pepper with shrimp cake.

For M - chow fun (without the meat), taro cake, pepper stuffed with shrimp cake.

We don't do much research before going out to Portland since we're visiting family and we don't really have much self-directed food time (if any), so we don't know where Ocean City ranks in the Portland dim sum hierarchy. (We visited a different place over four years ago that was excellent, but don't know how good it is now.) But we were really glad we got to fill up on some dim sum. Twice!

Ocean City Seafood Restaurant is located at 3016 SE 82nd Avenue in Portland, Oregon.