Ming's

Water and tea are brought to the table as soon as you are seated, and it's not long before carts filled with bamboo steamer baskets and metal tins filled with all sorts of delicious and tasty morsels begin to stop by.

Ming's has all the traditional dimsum you'd expect such as siu mai (available in pork, shrimp or chicken), xiao lung bao, har gow, bird's nest, pot stickers, turnip cakes, barbecue pork buns (in both steamed and baked varieties), but they also have a good variety of items you won't find anywhere else, such as curry pockets, custard and red bean tapioca, and little mochi bunnies filled with egg custard and dusted with coconut shavings. Ming's also has a dimsum sized serving of Peking Duck and bowls of Shark Fin Soup are available as well. (I haven't come across many dim sum places that serve shark fin soup)

The food is great and the variety is wonderful. Unlike most dim sum places, Ming's clearly runs on a three-tier system -- they have cart pushers, the cart reloaders (who also do empty basket pickup) and the service waiters (who refill the tea pot and hand you the check), and these duties are never mixed. Service in this style, is however faster than you might expect, and the service waiters do a pretty good job as to which patron needs what service.

The only complaint I had about this place was that the food tended to be warm rather than hot, but part of that maybe due to where we were seated, the restaurant is quite cavernous, and we were located at the tail end of the dim sum train.