Barbara and I just got back from brunch at Chau Chow, which has finally re-opened for dine-in dim sum—weekends only for now, and no carts, just ordering from the menu. This is actually an interesting trade-off, as carts let you look at items and point to them, so you can see exactly what you’re ordering, but the menu lets you see the actual names of the items. Also, at the moment they’re offering only about half of their usual menu. So we couldn’t have our beloved XLBs or roast pork buns or stuffed mushrooms. And they haven’t had their lovely stuffed eggplant for many months. Nevertheless we had more than enough to eat, and everything was delicious. Photos show exactly what we had. (I had thought about pasting the Chinese names into the photos, as an aid to identification, but decided against it. We had shrimp dumplings, beef ribs, steamed buns with roast pork, rice noodle with beef, two kinds of shumai, and taro stuffed with shrimp paste; you can mix and match to pair them with the images. Fortunately we don’t keep kosher.)

Categories: Dorchester/Boston, Food & Restaurants