Seattle: Dim Sum at Purple Dot Cafe

On my second day in Seattle, I intended to gorge myself silly on seafood and wanted to get chowder. But after a long day of drinking, I decided I rather have something more substantial and thoughts turned to dim sum. Doing a brief survey, we headed over to Purple Dot Cafe.

Walking in, I realized it was really more like a Hong Kong style cafe. Ladies came out with trays bearing dim sum and after one put almost everything on her tray on our table and asked if we wanted rice noodle rolls (cheung fun), we never saw them come around again. All right, one round it is.

Although I heard the mother tongue being spoken, I didn’t feel the dim sum was spectacular in any way. My favorite dish was actually the willy spare ribs. The bones had a habit of shooting across the table if you weren’t eating delicately (hard to do).

The har gow (crystal shrimp) and siu mai were on the smaller side but probably more accurate of how they used to be. Back in the 80s, our dumplings morphed into the mega things we see now. I like the shrimp better than the siu mai. Those dumplings had some chopped up business that wasn’t roe on top. How interesting.

We also got loh mi gai (sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves) and XLB (soup dumplings). The XLB were on the drier side but I rather liked the loh mi gai. I could have probably gotten the chicken feet but my dining companion had strong feelings of “NO!!!” on that one.

At last the shrimp cheung fun arrived and we were done with our meal in no time flat.

I hear this place is great for late night with fantastic fries. Something to keep in mind next time, I suppose.

 

Purple Dot Cafe

515 Maynard Ave S, Seattle, WA 98104 – (206) 622-0288