For an official Chinese New Year celebration Pat organised for a group of us to head in to Chinatown for some dim sum. A week ago he’d tried to book at our favourite dim sum restaurant Laureate and although initially they said he could book for 12, when he called back to confirm they said, sorry we can’t take your booking so you’ll have to just turn up on Sunday and take your chances. Well, he got there early today but even that wasn’t enough to get us a table immediately and with the wait promising to be over an hour we headed instead into the China Town mall and to Golden Dragon.

Actually just getting to the restaurants was hard enough with the Chinese New Year parade going down Shaftesbury Avenue and effectively cutting off access to the mall if you came from Soho. It was also absolutely rampacked in the surrounding streets and I ended up doing a giant circle just to get to Golden Dragon!

Dim sum in a giant group has its good and bad points. Good because you end up with a good variety of dishes bad because its hard to get everyone’s preferences in. We also had one pescatorian (fish eating vegetarian) and one non-seafood eater so trying to come up with a combination of dishes that suited both was a bit tricky.

We were lucky to get a table in a pretty short period of time at Golden Dragon. By the time I got there at just past 12 the line was way out the door. It was clearly a good day for business today at all the surrounding restaurants. Our table was upstairs and in a corner so service was pretty average. They managed to take our orders efficiently enough but requests for things like water got lost. At least we didn’t have too much pressure to hurry up and get out of there. Food was tasty and though not up to par with Laureate still made for a good meal.