Don’t let the name fool you, this place is 100% vegan and I was very excited about having an extensive dim sum menu to choose from. It’s always a thrill to have lots of small dishes to share, though truthfully I’m not sure any of our party knew enough about dim sum to choose the best dishes. Still, we ordered a good amount of food and we really enjoyed sampling so many different things.

Practicalities first: we were given a piece of paper with all the dim sum items listed and a pencil, and we went through and indicated which dishes we wanted to try (and how many portions, though we only got one of each). Then after the server collected the paper, everything was brought out as and when it was ready.

I thought I remembered that I liked pan fried turnip cake from my time in Hong Kong – alas, I was wrong. I quite liked the gelatinous texture, but it had a slightly bitter taste. This was the only thing Mother HH wouldn’t even finish, and it fell a bit flat for all of us.

The fried sticky rice dumpling had a nice texture but was unsurprisingly a little bland. We should have chosen something a bit more exciting, but there are so many buzzwords (fried! sticky! dumpling!) we were powerless to resist.

I will always order pastry, so we shared the veg meat pastry dish. The pastry didn’t disappoint, but the meaty filling was a little sweeter than we would have liked.

You can’t go wrong with a fried spring roll, can you? These were crisped to perfection, and the vegetable filling was nicely seasoned – often a spring roll is all about the crunch while the seasoning is bland and the filling virtually nonexistent, but these were good all-rounders.

Mother HH thought these looked a bit too weird, but the veg chicken bean curd rolls were very much my cup of tea. I love a bit of bean curd, and these had a really fun texture.

We tried the steamed veg shrimp dumplings hoping they’d have quite big pieces or shrimp in them, but unfortunately that was not the case (and presumably if we were dim sum aficionados we would have known that). Still, there were pleasant little morsels.

And this was the real dish of the day: veg ribs with salt pepper. I’ve had vegan ribs in various places before, but never anything remotely like this. The texture was completely foreign to me (I’m not sure I ever had ribs before I went vegetarian as a child), and it was incredibly more-ish, really chewy on the inside and crisp on the outside. It tasted meaty and salty. It was absolutely joyous. I would have happily ordered another plate, even though we were in no way hungry after all of this.

While the food was very good indeed, we had a strange and unpleasant experience with our first server. I was going to say that she was a bit too physical with us, but really, there should be no level of physical contact, should there? I’m not sure anyone who works in hospitality has intentionally touched me since 2020 (if ever). But she was all over us. Rather than just setting the pencil down on our table, she grabbed Dr HH’s hand and forced the pencil into it, then held his hand over the paper to indicate how we should mark our chosen items. Then she kept pawing at Mother HH, trying to massage her back or arms. It was baffling stuff. Everyone else who brought us our food or settled our bill was perfectly normal, so perhaps there’s just one extremely handsy woman who we were unlucky to get. She also had some very sexist comments to make about gender roles and described herself as hot. We were just not a good match for whatever material she had, I’m afraid.

Even with the risk of encountering her again, we’d be back though. The ribs are worth the social discomfort – and really, is there any greater compliment than that?!

What’s your dim sum of choice? And have you ever seen vegan ribs like these ones?