Dim sum party at Gu's Bistro

We recently discovered Gu's Bistro which has both delicious Sichuan food and is pretty close to the house. I read a lot of things about Gu's Bistro, including the fact that when they have a reservation for ten on a Sunday, they open up reservations for a dim sum party and if you time it properly, you can get into it and enjoy 10-12 courses of deliciousness.

So when I saw that there was going to be a dim sum party on Mother's Day, I called for a reservation immediately.

We started off with this black rice soup which was faintly sweet. It was meant to ease into the meal. It was a bit bland, though better bland than super sweet, right?

Mmm, their cold spicy noodles made with a thicker noodle. I get the feeling that these noodles were made by hand. Deliciously chewy, spicy, tasty.

And then sesame seed-rolled glutinous rice balls with peanuts in a honied sauce. Pretty damn sweet. But the rice balls were tender and delicious inside.

Ma la chicken. The server made a point of telling the next table (when they finally arrived) that this is normally served with whole chicken, bones and all, but for ease of eating, here it was served with chicken filets. Pretty tasty.

This one one of my favorites. It was like a Sichuan version of a soup dumpling. It tasted like pork and Chinese leeks and was juicy inside. I assume this is somewhere on their regular menu and I just haven't seen it yet. I will look.

These are ma la green bean jelly noodles. The serving included pieces of celery and the cooling taste of the noodles really cut through the spicy.

The next table showed up several courses late. It ended up being a dad and one of his children and I guess they knew the host because he was there the entire time talking about inane things and they mostly drove me crazy.

Spring roll! Very crispy.

It was pretty dry inside and the beef reminded me of my dad's cold beef with tendons.

These are zhong style dumplings which were a little sweet. Good, but I like the other ones we get better.

This is the inside of a zhong-style dumpling.

Glutinous rice ball with lotus seed paste inside.

A mysterious lotus leaf-wrapped goodie!

Not quite sure what was inside the lotus leaf but there was an incredibly sticky glutinous rice paste covering a ground pork mixture.

This was a curious dish. Something like cubes of cold beef with chili oil served over soy bean paste. The servers were not very knowledgeable about what things were so there was only one woman who would tell me what I was eating.

Deep fried potato. Topped with sugar.

This was a super weird dish. The sugar was overwhelming. It was interesting to deep fry a potato in a batter.

Tong yuen, the classic. Filled with lotus seed paste.

All in all, an interesting meal. It was interesting to get a trial on so many of their different dishes, though it also seemed like a lot of their dishes were just topped with ma la, not to say that that is actually a bad thing.

So I thought the dim sum party was interesting, but perhaps I would prefer to stick to ordering straight off the menu.