85. Hollywood East Cafe on the Boulevard
In case you’re curious, the “Boulevard” in this case, is University Blvd. And if you’re familiar with the greater Wheaton area, which is impressive, you know that University Blvd. is no Rodeo Drive. That said, the Boulevard itself did make for an exciting part of our meal since we decided to run across six lanes of its traffic to get to our dim sum this morning. Now that is dedication.
Hollywood East Cafe (we’ll use the short title) is not a place you would stumble on unless you just couldn’t make a decision of which Peruvian chicken place to stop at and just threw your hands up and walked in to the first place that didn’t have ‘pollo’ in the name. The outside doesn’t scream dim sum—there’s a huge neon sign (for the huge name) and a blue plastic palm tree at the front door—but once you’re inside it is all Hong Kong. Having been to Hong Kong once before for a memorable 18 hours of eating, I can tell you that Hollywood East Cafe hits the nail on the head with decor—banquet seating, giant Chinese character on the wall, mean host at the front door in a suit that looked as if he had worn it every day of his life. The place was packed with the most multi-culti array of customers I had ever seen in the greater DC area. Once we were hustled to our seats, the eating began.
This was my first trip to a real life dim sum restaurant complete with the girls pushing carts full of steaming plates of unidentifiable goodies. It was a little overwhelming at first, so we decided just to point to things that we thought were easy to eat with chopsticks. I won’t go through all of our tiny plates, but some favorites were the pork buns which were sweet and tasty, the chicken and mushrooms in rice paper and the barbeque chicken. I also thought the shrimp tempura was really tasty, the shrimp were huge and the tempura wasn’t a bit greasy and really crispy—a pretty amazing accomplishment for a dish that had made its way halfway around the restaurant in a steamer cart.
There were a couple items that weren’t great, but it wasn’t so much that they didn’t taste good but that they probably had been sitting in the cart a little too long. It was my own fault (I’m not a morning person and the Connecticut Ave/Viers Mill Rd/University Blvd interchange is not exactly like driving through the mall parking lot), but we didn’t really get to the restaurant as early as we should of. They are only open until 2pm on Saturdays, and it seemed like they had stopped making new dishes by the time we were finishing up around 1pm. A total bummer since they seemed to be out of something Washingtonian described as “custard doughnuts fashioned into carrots”. I’ll definitely have to go back just to see what that really is. Maybe with GPS next time.
