Wei Hong Seafood Restaurant, University City - Visited April 2015


Since my son was on an orchestra trip, we were planning on having our typical family lunch out on Sunday instead of Saturday especially since Sunday is my actual birthday. But we decided today may be a good occasion to visit one of the dim sum restaurants in town since neither my son nor my mother-in-law care for them, so it could just be my wife, my daughter and myself going, I narrowed it down to Lu Lu's, Wonton King or Wei Hong Seafood on Olive, and decided on the latter, just because they are in an old theater and I had never actually eaten there before.

We arrived shortly before noon and were happy to see they had a good sized lot next to and behind the building which was only slightly full. We noticed "entrance" signs on the side of building but decided to enter in the front, which allowed us to walk through the old lobby of the theater. The large theater area was full of tables, but for dim sum they were only using the front section and there were only  a handful of tables occupied. We were promptly seated and offered beverages (we chose water) and a lady with a cart appeared just a few minutes later. She had shu mai, sticky rice in lotus leaves, shrimp dumplings and other such tasty morsels and we ordered a few plates of them. The next cart had steamed pork buns, and we grabbed two orders of those (they were very good!), and the following cart had taro cakes. A later cart had the sesame balls which we needed to finish off our meal. We did have a one miscue - the scallops with some weird orange stuff on top. Even I did not finish off the last one, and there was one steamed pork dumpling which had some weird flavor to it which I could not quite place, but I did polish all of those off! All in all the food was pretty good as far as standard Dim Sum entrees, but we noticed almost all the dishes came in groups of three pieces, so we were lucky there were in fact three of us!

The atmosphere was very unique, and vintage "cheap Chinese restaurant". The chairs were old brown wooden chairs, with one of them being uneven and rocking, and they added a thin flimsy cushion on top which was barely noticeable. The chopsticks they offered were large plastic things which were quite slippery and hard to use to grasp the food very easily. We would have preferred the cheap wooden things like you get at SanSai or Pei Wei. We noticed they had flat HDTV's mounted on the wall, but we were glad they were not on playing weird Chinese videos like the Hunan Garden off Page used to have years ago. Hunan Garden used to be the place we always went to dim sum when we lived near Creve Coeur, but they have since closed. Wei Hong had a much different kind of feel to it, less noisy and roomier, and more laid back.

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