Red Bowl Restaurant - Dim Sum

The purpose of this blog is to review and share my experiences at Birmingham's numerous restaurants. I will occasionally add in some content relating to preparation and cooking of wild game. My goal is that you know the ins and outs of a restaurant you may be interested in going to before you actually go. Maybe you live in another town and are visiting Birmingham for the first time, maybe you grew up here and have never ventured outside the box to some of the wonderful ethnic restaurants, or maybe you're like me and love reading about food experiences and just looking for another food blog to read. Whatever brings you here, I hope that you learn something new that you didn't already know.

To kick off the blog with my first post, I am going to review my experience this past weekend at Red Bowl restaurant on Green Springs. I had a good friend in town for the weekend and we were able to talk my pregnant wife into going with us. She's a real trooper!

Red Bowl Restaurant is a Chinese and Korean restaurant that adjoins to an Asian supermarket. At the time of this writing, it is the only place I know of in Birmingham that offers Dim Sum. Dim Sum is basically a type of Chinese cuisine that serves small steamed baskets or plates of food from a small cart. You are given a menu with options and as the cart comes by, you select the dishes you want to try. (Hint: I would decide ahead of time what you wish to order and calculate the cost in advance. If you order with your eyes only, your bill can easily exceed $50 for two people.)

We decided to start off with the shrimp and pork shumai, chicken feet, and the chicken in sweet rice. The shrimp and pork shumai is one of the most popular dim sum items globally. It was good, and tasted a lot like a steamed dumpling filled with pork. I didn't taste much shrimp in it. The chicken feet were more of a right of passage order than desire. I have had chicken feet once before, and they taste a lot like what you might think. The flavor is basically whatever sauce they are tossed in, but the texture, oh man, the texture. It gelatinous, cartilaginous, and lots of tiny bones to deal with. I din't love it, but I didn't hate it either. The real star of the whole experience for me was the chicken in sweet rice. The whole dish is wrapped in a lotus leaf before steaming. Once you unwrap the leaf, this is what you get:

The rice was a little hard, but in a good way. It was reminiscent of the texture of clay pot rice. The chicken was so tender and the spice was minimal with a little sweetness and a slight hint of star anise. This was by far my favorite dish. 

We then ordered the BBQ duck, cheese wontons, and thai style chicken. 

The BBQ duck was very similar to what you would expect from BBQ duck in a Chinese restaurant. The skin was cripsy, and the meat inside perfectly tender and moist. The cheese wontons were great, but very similar to a crab rangoon that you see at most Chinese restaurants. The thai style chicken was a little bit of a let down. It was chicken wings coated in a sauce that tasted a lot like the asian sauce you might get at a big chain wing establishment.

At this point in the meal, I probably should have stopped eating, but I had my heart set on trying some sort of shrimp dumpling. The crystal shrimp dumplings caught my eye, and while they were one of the more expensive items on the menu, I was undeterred. 

These were probably my 2nd favorite dish. The dumplings were moist and the shrimp filling was delicious. A great choice to end the meal on.

I would highly recommend trying out Dim Sum at Red Bowl if you are looking for a fun, food sharing experience. They offer Dim Sum on Saturday and Sunday from 11am-2pm. The servers were very helpful and were more than happy to explain each dish.