The whole idea of building a “SUMA life” in the suburbs is to try to find ways to recreate and fashion an urban experience in the suburban environment, in what is probably ultimately a failed attempt to retain some semblance of the life you lived before you exiled yourself. It’s not easy. But it’s not supposed to be easy. The whole point of living in the city is that you can have experiences that you simply can’t replicate when you live in the suburbs. But as with many things, there is heroism in the attempt.
With that in mind, we wanted to try to find a place to get dim sum — the “Chinese brunch” experience that you can get in like a dozen places in Chinatown and, I would guess, in other urban Chinatowns, and, I would also guess, in, you know, China. My wife is a Chinese-American, so dim sum became a pretty regular staple of our weekends. Most weeks, we’d just order dim sum-like appetizers from our local Chinese place, but that’s not the same. Dim sum isn’t about the food, it’s about the experience, which requires certain atmospherics:
- First, you need a huge warehouse-like space with a ton of people sitting, often community-style, about big tables. You can’t get real dim sum in some fancy upscale Asian fusion restaurant.
- Second, you need the carts, those metal monstrosities being wheeled around with all the little plates on them. You can’t get real dim sum by ordering from a menu. Flagging down a cart, getting a plate, and then having the waitstaff stamp your “card” with some totally incomprehensible mark that eventually determines how much you’ll pay is part of the fun.
- Third, you need a lot of food that the white people like me won’t ever eat. It’s not real dim sum if you don’t see stuff like bird’s feet or pig’s knuckles (or bird knuckles and pig’s feet, I can’t remember which) that isn’t, in my opinion, actual food, but which real Chinese people like. (Indeed, one of the things I’ve learned about marrying into a Chinese-American family is that the greatest delicacies are precisely the foods that are most inedible, something I have learned at many Chinese wedding banquets where the only thing I could eat was the plain lo mein noodles served at the end like a palate cleanser).
- Fourth, you need actual Chinese people eating there. You go to Chinatown, you can tell that you’re getting authentic dim sum because there are a lot of Chinese people there. I’m not racially profiling, or whatever, I’m just pointing out that you can take certain comforts in knowing that you’re not in some tourist trap, and that the food must be good, or at least authentic, if you see them there.
All that said, I didn’t have high hopes for finding dim sum in the suburbs. I can’t even get good everyday Chinese food like vegetable lo mein in the suburbs, much less a lip-smacking plate of bird feet. It’s not like I’m going to eat the bird feet, but I like knowing that it’s there.
Against all odds, though, we found a place. A simple Google search turned up an actual Chinese restaurant in Westchester called Central Seafood that’s about 20 minutes away and had some reviews mentioning the dim sum. So we went, and it was perfect — big rooms, round tables, lots of Chinese people, food I wouldn’t possibly ever eat. Not quite the Manhattan experience, but with some advantages like, you know, parking, and cleaner rest rooms (don’t ever go to the bathroom in Chinatown. Ever).
So we found a small piece of SUMA, a place to get our dim sum fix once a month, with the bonus that it’s very close to a great dog run where we can take the dog. Although, obviously, we won’t bring the dog to the restaurant, both for the health code issue and, you know, (stipulate to a Chinese people eating dog joke).
UPDATE: We have since found another place called Aberdeen in White Plains that we haven’t tried yet.
