With a little help from my friends, I finally introduced Shrek to dim sum on Sunday! I think we would’ve starved if we hadn’t had them with us…

Actually, we didn’t even use this. (And they do have another menu in English.) They came around old-school style with carts which I didn’t even encounter in Hong Kong. Nowadays most places have you order everything off a menu. Or in my case, you sit back and let someone who knows what they’re doing order for your table and dig in when it arrives!

Restaurant Peony is on the second-level of a shopping complex in Oakland’s Chinatown. It’s HUGE with three separate rooms, each the standard size of a single restaurant. And it was packed at 1230 pm on Sunday. Ahhh took me back to Hong Kong, especially since they didn’t speak English and they sat us in the back-back room since we had the only two white boys in the restaurant in our party. Ha! Usually I’m not one to complain about seating since I’m all about the food and service, but in this case your seat is tantamount to the quality of your meal. When you sit near the kitchen you have first dibs on whatever comes out. By the time the carts made it back to our table all the good stuff was taken.

Or was it?

Shrek’s fave: BBQ Pork Bao

Rice noodle rolls.

Hot and sour soup.

Chinese Broccoli with oyster sauce

Shrimp dumplings

Egg Tarts

Bad seating aside, we managed to eat quite well. We got quite a few additional dishes but these were all I had time to snap before they were snatched up and scarfed down. Really, my only disappointment was that we were too late to order my favorite Shanghai dumplings. They had them on the menu but said they weren’t making anymore today. Woh woh. Still, I’d say it was a success. Of course it wasn’t nearly as good as what we had in Hong Kong, but my taste buds were happy, my belly bulging, and hey, we each only owed $12 a piece with tip! Now if only they served mimosas here……..!