The dim sum menu is very similar to Sea Harbour’s. They did have one item that I don’t think was on the Sea Harbour menu last time I went: seafood suen juk guen—seafood wrapped in tofu sheets. Excellent, steaming fresh, great flavors, good quality tofu sheets, just the right amount of cornstarch thickened sauce. I enjoyed everything else we had, including the very good siu mai which were unusually light. But I just realized that we never got the bitter melon and chicken cheung fun. Hope we didn’t get charged for it.
I hadn’t eaten daan tat (egg custard pastry) in a long time, because everyone uses lard, yuck, I don’t want my dessert tasting like animal fat. Thought I’d give it a try here, but it was still lardy. Where is the good non-lard daan tat in LA?

Service was great: attentive and helpful, you don’t have to try to keep flagging someone down while they’re all ignoring you like at Sea Harbour. And they gave us each a menu when I requested it, not like at Sea Harbour, where they’re strangely skimpy with their menus. Plus they swapped out our dirty dishes for clean ones.

I’m going to have to do Elite, Triumphal, and King Hua all in one weekend sometime, so I can get a good close comparison. Maybe Sea Harbour too.

this ranks highly in my book among dim sum places. not your average dim sum banquet, king hua offered us a bounty of delicious and atypical as well as usual small plates of goodness beautifully constructed, which didn’t stop us from stuffing our faces.

there were a few things ordered that i wasn’t partial to, but most of the food was consistently flavorful and well done. the aesthetics of the dim sum adds to the impression that the chefs aren’t just cranking these out. standouts for me were the sweet & flavorful steamed bbq pork buns, juicy xiao long bao, shrimp dumpling with snow pea shoots.

the place looks a lot like sea harbour on the inside, with fancy carpeting, damask table cloths and fabric covered chairs. we were a part of a large group, and though the restaurant was packed, the food came quick and the service was good. with so many people, they had a hard time keeping our waters & tea full, but they were always eager to do it. they all thanked us as we left. like i said, not your average dim sum place.

I got an email late one night from Abby A., stating that she still had 3 more seats for the dim sum get together at a restaurant I hadn’t tried yet. I am glad I RSVP’d last minute. King Hua’s dim sum was delicious.

I arrived at the place about an hour early before the event which started at 9:45 AM. I wanted to get a good parking spot since many dim sum places tend to have tight parking. When I arrived, the parking lot was still empty and the place was still closed. I was surprised to find out that the place didn’t open until 10 AM. I thought that was odd, since all the other dim sum places I have gone to open earlier.

By the time the most of the party arrived (there were over 20 of us), they turned on the Open Sign and let us in. It looked like your standard dim sum place with a large banquet hall. It was nice and clean and to one side you could see aquarium tanks filled with live seafood, waiting to be eaten.

They seated us at the very end corner and looking across to the entrance of the restaurant, I wondered if it was just going to be our party eating alone in this large place. Our party was large enough that we took up 2 tables. I shouldn’t have worried though because by the time we finished our meals, the place was packed with people.

In this place, they give you a pictorial menu and you just select what looks most appetizing to you. You fill out the sheet and hand it over to the waiter. Basically the same process like when you order sushi. I did feel a little bit of nostalgia for the standard ladies pushing the dim sum carts and pointing at what looks and smells most interesting.

Most of our party was hungry and we were glad that the food was served promptly. They came in waves and waves. At first we gobbled up the initial dishes served to us, but as it slowly dawned on us that we may have ordered too much food, we started to slow down and get selective on what we ate.

I don’t know most of the names of what we ate, but I’ll be as descriptive as possible. The steamed shrimp dumplings we ordered all tasted similar, but good. The wrappings were nice and thin and not too chewy. But they some definitely earned the name pot stickers as we tried to get them from the platters. The main differentiation with the shrimp dumplings is what vegetables they were paired with. I think the only one I wasn’t too partial too was the one with too much green onion. The most exceptional of the shrimp dumplings were in rectangular shapes. They had this mildly sweet sauce on them that was so delicious that some of the folks in my party started putting the sauce on their plates as a dipping sauce.

There was a shrimp dish over a sticky rice mixture that most in the party didn’t really get into. It wasn’t congee, but it was still too mushy and sticky for my tastes. I prefer sweet rice with that texture on sweet desserts or champurado, not on a savory meal like this one was.

The steamed bao and baked bao pork buns were delicious. I normally don’t like the steamed version, but it was the first time I actually liked the steamed one better. The pork filling was very moist and tender. The pork was shredded, rather than cubed, which I am more used too. I normally detest cilantro, but the bao filling only had a little cilantro to accent the flavors, not overpower it like the herb normally does.

I did not eat the pork spare ribs since I did not find them appetizing on site. Most of the people in my party that tried them were not impressed with that dish. There was also a dish with bitter melon in it. I don’t like bitter melon and made the mistake of picking it up, thinking the filling was Chinese broccoli or bok choy. My bad.

The sesame balls were delicious. We couldn’t identify what was used for the filling. It wasn’t mung bean which I’m used to. It was more whitish in color. Some in our party said it may have been lotus root. Others said it was a bean or even sesame seed. Whatever it was, it was good. We else ended up with the egg custard cups. No one in our party recalled ordering that dish, but boy was it a pleasant surprise. The crust was flaky, soft and moist and the custard was creamy but not overpowering. I should have brought home more.

The other table ordered this dessert made from wolf berries. It looked like a cube of golden jello. I did not try it, but those that did didn’t seem impressed. They described as a jello version of green tea.

Overall all, the consensus was the food was delicious and the portions were larger compared to other dim sum restaurants this group has tried (and they have tried a lot of other dim sum places). It was a little pricey at $25 per person (including 15% gratuity), but we did over order. I think if we were more conservative, we could have gotten to something closer to $20 per person.

The waiters served the food quickly but we had to be really aggressive when asking for water refills and getting to go containers. Car parking is adequate.