Last night my roommate Sperry and I had a long overdue roomie night. We put on our Friday night best and went out for dinner to eat good food, have a few drinks and just catch up.

While Sperry was on her way to work she was reading Express Night Out and texted me to let me know that Ping Pong Dim Sum was voted best new restaurant so we decided that would be a great place for us to try – plus I was craving asian food so this was perfect.

We arrived at 7:30 and just had to wait a few minutes for our table to be cleared. The fact that this place takes reservations is good since it was packed! I was impressed with how many people the restaurant holds and I thought the interior was nice - high top tables and backless chairs in the bar, it wasn’t too dark and it was bustling. We grabbed a drink at the bar and as soon as we paid, our table was ready so we sat down and started to browse the menu.

Our table was right by a window and it was absolutely freezing, so I was a little disappointed with that but I hoped the food would warm me up. As for drinks, they were delicious. I started with a glass of white wine – the drink menu is very very innovative and I wanted to try whatever Sperry got so I could try it first before ordering. By far the best drink that we had all night was the lemon grass and lime (middle pic) which was made with Jewel of Russia vodka, fresh lemongrass and lime and lychee juice. I also ordered the ping pong (Martini Bianco, white wine, Yokaichi Shochuand lychee juice) but that was nothing to rave about.

As we went through the menu we wanted to try at least one thing from every category: baked, fried, steamed, sticky rice, vegetable, griddled and signature dishes (we didn’t get any soup or salad but those were on the menu too).

We ordered:

• Char sui bun: honey bbq pork in in a fluffy white bun
• Scallop and shitake dumpling: scallops and king prawns with shitake mushrooms in wheat flour pastry
• Traditional sticky rice: rice with chicken, pork and king prawns wrapped in a lotus leaf
• Chicken and king prawn shumai: chicken and king prawns in an open pastry topped with shitake mushroom in a translucent white pastry
• Spicy chicken dumpling: chicken and vegetables in chili sauce in translucent white pastry
• Chicken and black pepper spring roll: honey roasted chicken sprinkled with black pepper wrapped in wheat flour pastry, served with spicy mango sauce
• Spicy basil dumpling: basil and chili with rice noodles in wheat flour pastry with a vinegar dipping sauce
• Crispy asparagus: fried asparagus in a light coating dusted with Sichuan pepper
• Bok choy: steamed bok choy in ginger and garlic sauce

Overall the food was good, but to be honest I was not super impressed.  Everything had good flavor and it was a lot of fun to try and compare each dish. My favorite was by far the spicy basil dumplings. The basil added an interesting flavor twist to the dish. The bun was also tasty and the texture of the bun was something that I had never experienced before.  As for the shumai, I thought it was just about average (I’m partial to Mandarin Gourmet’s pork shumai) and sauces that came with each were pretty underwhelming.

One thing that did bother me though was that when the food was delivered they took away the covers for the dishes and since we were at such a cold table the food got cold pretty quickly.

All in all, the drinks were decent (if you ordered the right one) and the food was good, but I can’t guarantee that I would put this at the top of my list of places to go back to.