Restaurant Review: China Town Seafood, Christchurch

Have noticed that there is a dearth of restaurant reviews for NZ, more specifically for the South Island. I'll do my little part and contribute brief reviews of places that we have eaten at.

We just returned to Nelson from an excellent long weekend trip to Christchurch. Did some research on potential dim sum places (out here its called yum char) and came up with two names. China Town Seafood in Christchurch and Foo San in Riccarton (near the university). Since we were in downtown, we opted for China Town, plus my research indicated it was potentially a better choice. It also got a decent review in Cuisine. China Town is located at 71 Kinmore Street.

We were heading back to Nelson after lunch, so we opted to eat early and got there at 11:30. The lower section is closed on Monday which gave us a slight fright, as we thought the restaurant was closed, however the door to the upper section was open. We were the only party at that time and were seated quite promptly. A few of the seafood dim sum items were not yet ready, but there was enough to get started. Overall we thought the dim sum was quite good, and the quality of the seafood was very good. We had a few plates of shrimp, scallop, chicken and vegetarian dumplings, pork sui mai, pork and corn dumpling, turnip cake, steamed bok choi and fish balls (the kids really liked this and gobbled them up). For dessert we had sesame seed balls and egg tart. We had not had dim sum since we left San Francisco 6 weeks ago, and we were pleased with this place. Mari thought it was better than Good Luck Dim Sum in SF, I thought it was not as good but a very viable alternative (the quality of the seafood used was significantly better here). It was also extremely reasonable and our bill was NZD $46. A similar meal at Ton Kiang would have cost us USD $75 or so