If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know I love dim sum. I love the opportunity to try a lot of really small bites in a meal, and I do love a whole lot of Asian flavors. There are a wide variety of dim sum houses in the bay area, but a lot of the ones that seem to get buzz are the ones that are a bit on the fancy side. Palette Tea House is one of these dim sum houses that recently opened in Ghirardelli Square. It’s conveniently across from one of our favorite local tasting rooms (Wattle Creek), so one day while we were out having a fantastic day of wine tasting, I decided to book us into Palette so we could end our day with what I was hoping would be some fantastic Chinese food.
It’s a fairly large location, and it’s beautifully decorated. There is even themed crockery to make your table look like you’re preparing to paint some artwork. Of course, we decided to look immediately at the wine list. The bottle list wasn’t very extensive, and while we recognized and liked a lot of the wines on the list, we also weren’t in the mood to spend three times the price of a bottle for dinner. Luckily, the corkage fee was our saving grace as that meant we could get some wine from across the square at Wattle Creek and enjoy it with our dinner! There are a lot of food options available on the menu, and it can be quite easy to go overboard as they give you a pencil to write down what you like. We tried to be reasonable, but we still ended up with a lot of food. We avoided some of the market price seafood dishes, but I did see some of the crab that came out to other tables and it looked fantastic.
The food started coming out. The black swan dumplings were a great take on taro dumplings with charcoal to give them a rich, dark color. We also had some pork buns (of course), and while I always want them, these ones felt like they were a bit lacking in the flavor department. The oxtail soup dumplings were absolutely delicious though, with rich, melt-in-the-mouth oxtail inside a great wrapper. I was sad that I only had one, to be honest. We had a special of beef tongue skewers, and the tongue was perhaps one of the best preparations I’ve eaten as the beef was succulent and soft. The Sichuan seafood dumplings were also a treat with a great sauce. The sauces served at the beginning were also an added bonus as they had a variety of flavors from sweet to salty to spicy that could really amp up the flavors in the dishes.
We also ordered some pickled vegetables which were nice, but not the best I’ve had. Next up were corn fritters, and they were pretty fantastic with a really great sauce on the side. Finally, we got one large plate of the Akaushi short rib with bone marrow because we always want bone marrow. It was a fantastic dish, but it didn’t feel that Chinese. There were a lot of other things on the large plate list we were interested in too though, so I can imagine that many of the other dishes may feel more Chinese in style.
Of course, I always want dessert, and while they offer a dessert sampler, there was a chocolate dish on it that we weren’t interested in, and there were egg custard buns that we were, so we ordered three different things to try. The buns were pretty delicious to be honest, with a nice sweet interior. The Portuguese tarts had a nice flavor, but my pastry was very undercooked, so I was disappointed somewhat in them. The blueberry sesame balls were also not what I really wanted, as I love a good red bean sesame ball, and these were stuffed with blueberries and not really covered in sesame. It was an interesting take, but I definitely would have preferred something traditional.
I think overall Palette Tea House did a fantastic job with their dishes. Not everything was perfect, as the pork buns were just okay and some of the dessert dishes were a bit lacking in execution, but there were a lot of deep flavors to many of the other dishes. And a lot of the seafood dishes that came out to other tables looked amazing. It will definitely be staying on my list of places to return to, even if the price is quite high for dim sum, although the dim sum here definitely isn’t your casual Sunday dim sum.
Score: 4/5
Recommendation: Oxtail soup dumplings and black swan dumplings!
Palette Tea House
900 North Point St, Ste #B201
San Francisco, CA 94109
