Dim Sum at Pacificana

Yesterday some friends who live in Williamsburg suggested we go to Pacificana, an immense dim sum restaurant on 8th and 55th. We got there at around 1pm, and the half hour wait we were advised we'd have when we got our wait number turned out to be no more than fifteen minutes. Once seated at a large round table that was half our party and half a Chinese family (which was not awkward in the slightest considering all focus was on the assortment of food being wheeled around the room) we nodded eagerly or said "no thank you" to the plates and steamers of dumplings, savory cakes, vegetable dishes, meat and fish selections that were offered to us from carts or on trays by strictly-business Chinese servers.

Here's the system, for the uninitiated (like me): your party is seated, you receive an empty restaurant check ticket, and with each item that you accept, the servers write your selections in, and at the end, a hostess totals your bill, which is what you bring to the register.

We tried a roast pork dish with crispy skin, sliced into strips and laid atop a crunchy salad of sweet pickled radish and chewy cold tripe (which I mistook for clear wide bean starch noodles); dumplings that miraculously contained soup with bits of pork, and are eaten from a soup spoon with the guidance of chopsticks; translucent shrimp shumai and shrimp/pork dumplings with a delicate pale yellow wrapper; warm, bright, crunchy, tasty green Chinese vegetable dressed with sesame oil and soy; rectangular taro cakes that tasted like potato pancakes with a creamy inside reminiscent of au gratin, and a cold summer-style roll that I couldn't exactly identify but that contained fried tofu skin or something texturally similar. We ordered a few sweet items for dessert - custard filled buns with a light, fresh creamy filling and a dusting of sweet crumbs, and small ruffly green tarts filled with durian that my husband loved and I vow to try on my next time back.