Valencia Eats: 98º Dim Sum — Pickle Deli Square

Seeing a Dim Sum restaurant open up in one of my favorite parts of town, near Torres de Serranos, I was super excited! I heard that it was from the same people who run the restaurant La Comisaría, which I quite liked the one time I tried it. It's kind of a Spanish tapas restaurant with Asian influences (like so many other trendy places in town nowadays). So expectations were quite high.

On Mondays, they have an all-you-can-eat format, where they just keep bringing you food until you tell them to stop. Quite a good value at 15 €.

They brought out some shrimp chips as we were waiting for our friends.

Strangely, with a set menu it still took half an hour for them to bring out the salad. It was quite good, with fresh flavors, though I would prefer the vegetables to be cut a bit more fine to have a better mix with the dressing. In fact, since one doesn't order anything but just allows the kitchen to send things out, and the fact that dim sum is steamed and they can keep the food on steamers for long periods of time, it was very strange how long it took for the dishes to come out.

Then came fried wontons, with my absolute favorite filling - (any kind of meat) with celery! What a high note to start on!

Then the evening went downhill from there. The "Char Siu Bao" had a dough that was far to flimsy, crumbly upon touching with chopsticks.

The beef siu mai was decent, though the wrapper was undercooked. Poorly cooked wrappers would be a problem throughout the evening - there were often hard parts and large areas caked with white flour.

Then came course after course of dim sum in various shapes but similar (so so) fillings. The vegetable dim sum were especially disappointing. They had one called "El Veggie," with peas, yellow lentils, sweet potato, and leeks, tasty sounding ingredients let down when they were all pureed together like baby food.

The "Har Gow" was also quite sad. Instead of whole shrimp, what seemed to be shrimp dust was encased by a thick wrapper. Even the menu says it uses "Masa Transparente," so they KNOW that the wrapper should end up being transparent. So why not make it that way?

The left and upper dim sum are supposed to be "har gow"

I was finally disappointed because one of the more innovative-sounding dim sum called "Cuak Cuak," a supposed xiaolongbao containing roast duck, scallions, and "mango demi," was not available.

I think I often cut a lot of slack for Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, etc. food in Spain. Because often it will not be very authentic, but tasty nonetheless. 98º Dim Sum is a case where I simply can't recommend it, since they can't seem to even get basics right, like not leaving lots of flour remaining on wrappers.