Everyone wants the little piggies, plump white buns with black sesame-seed eyes, orange snouts and slashes of ears that look more like worried brows. At Joy Luck Palace in Manhattan’s Chinatown, they come three to a steamer basket and harbor gooey souls of custard.  Every day hundreds of them are wheeled around a dining room that would dwarf some nations’ airports. It’s a wonder that any make it, unsnatched, to the far side, but somehow the dim-sum cart ladies manage it, like Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes.  The piggies are cute, but a diversion. The truly great custard buns are neither ornamented nor anthropomorphized, but simply pale as ghosts, giving no hint of the lushness within: custard dark gold and voluptuous with salted duck yolk. It’s salty and sweet in the eternal battle that may as well be love.  Some call them lava buns — justifiably, as a diner discovered when the molten filling shot all over her dress. A waitress clucked. “This one doesn’t know how to eat,” she said in Cantonese.  Joy Luck Palace opened in January in a space that has seen multiple dim sum iterations. (In the early 1990s, one, Harmony Palace, was reportedly run by the head of the notorious Ghost Shadows gang.) Now the chandeliers and brocade curtains are gone, replaced by bare walls and squiggly ceiling cutouts contoured in colored lights.  Diners pass through a lobby flanked by lethargic crabs in watery cubicles and glass cases stocked with long-lobed Buddha figurines. Up the steps, the besieged host shouts numbers into a microphone. There are enough tables to seat 500, and from morning to early afternoon, every one of them is full.  The chef, Hui Qiang Liu, from Guangzhou in southern China, has a steady hand with classics: translucent har gow with tidy pleats and open-mouthed siu mai in ruched collars, dense turnip cakes and slippery cheong fun, char siu bao with cracked smiles and baked pork buns as shiny as brioche. You grab what you can: rugged fish balls, bony nubs of spare ribs, ribbons of tripe and chicken feet yielding their cartilage.  At times, this can feel like a scavenger hunt. Here: bamboo shoots bundled in sagging folds of bean-curd skin. There: lotus leaves that unfold to reveal sticky rice and the steamy scent of earth after rain.  The little piggies are a nod to a Hong Kong fad. But older dishes are honored, too, like cups of bitter melon stuffed with pork, dried shrimp and dried scallop, the first bite unconscionably bitter, the second almost sweet.  Our reporters and editors review new releases from Alton Brown, Diana Henry and more.  I have yet to meet a person of Chinese descent who wholly approves of the state of dim sum in New York City. Much of what you get at Joy Luck Palace is good, if not transcendent, and some of it, by the time it reaches your table, may have gone cold or stale.  But the range is thrilling: whole shrimp robed in sticky rice, as if beaded in pearls; tight sacs of curried squid; chewy disks of glutinous rice flour with pork sealed inside. Then comes cart after cart of rich golden cake with tiny sinkholes, leaf-shaped buns hiding daubs of purple taro, pale green puffs wafting the telltale scent of durian and more desserts than I could ever try.  Johnny Yee, who owns the restaurant with Yong Jin Chan, also oversees Kam Hing Coffee Shop, whose memorable spongecakes taste of little but eggs and the tears of angels. Every morning they are brought fresh to Joy Luck Palace, but are available for takeout only.  Expect disorder. I spent one meal chasing dim-sum carts when none could get through the close-set tables surrounding mine. Small parties share tables with strangers, and a dirty tablecloth may be half rolled up and a clean one half rolled out — yin and yang — to accommodate lingerers and new arrivals.  Still, in the end, everyone is taken care of. Once, when I asked for soy sauce, a waitress looked suspiciously at our table and pointed to a helping of cheong fun swamped with soy. “You already have,” she said in Cantonese.  We thought we would never see her again, but a moment later she returned, carrying two little dishes of soy sauce. She didn’t smile, but it felt like grace.  Recommended Dishes Har gow; siu mai; cheong fun; sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves; pearl shrimp balls; turnip cakes; pineapple pork buns; bean-curd-skin rolls; fish balls; baked pork buns; salted-duck-yolk custard buns; golden cakes; taro buns; sponge rolls; sesame balls. Dim sum, $2.25 to $5.75; dinner, $12.95 to $28.95.  Drinks and Wine Beer and wine.  Open Daily dim sum for breakfast and lunch; nightly for dinner.  Reservations Not accepted for dim sum; dinner only.  Wheelchair Access There is a ramp from the lobby to the dining room. The restroom has a handrail.  This information was last updated: Sep. 29, 2016
Crowds seek the little piggy buns along with the classics at this perpetually packed restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown.