Enormous, bustling Sharpstown Hong Kong-style restaurant offering over 100 dim sum items.

7320 Sw Fwy, Ste 115, Houston, TX 77074
(713) 779-2288
Website

11am–9:30am Mon–Thu; 11am–10:00pm Fri; 10:30am–10:30am Sat; 10:30am–9:30am Sun
Full-service dim sum: Sat & Sun, 10:30am-3:00pm (dim sum items available from menu Mon–Fri, 11am–3:00pm)

Living multiple states away from any relatives, we usually choose to avoid hectic holiday travel plans and do our visiting at other times of year. Once we made that decision this year, it was an easy choice to go out for our holiday meal, followed by the realization that all sorts of foods (actually, most foods, but especially Chinese food) taste better than roast turkey and steamed green beans. Dim sum sounded like just the thing, so we headed out to sample the goodies at Fung’s Kitchen, a prosperous and popular Hong Kong-style restaurant. Fung’s is known for seafood and Peking duck, but also serves dim sum daily. As it turns out, approximately half of Houston’s population had the same idea. After managing to snag a parking space and waiting a bit for a table for two, we were ushered into Fung’s cavernous dining hall. Large groups of diners were happily chatting and passing small plates, waitstaff bustled about, lobsters and massive crabs stared out from the bubbling tanks lining the walls, and, most importantly, carts loaded with seemingly-endless assorted delights were making their way from table to table.

Fung’s offers an astounding number of dim sum dishes, so one visit is not nearly enough to get a full picture of what’s available. Each dish is priced according to size, from $2.25 to $5.45, with a few “supreme” items costing $6.45. This doesn’t seem too expensive, but it can add up if you start greedily pointing at everything in sight. To be honest, we were in “holiday mode” and kind of ended up losing our minds, ordering way too much stuff, and not keeping particularly good track of it all this time, so what follows may be a touch more “impressionistic” than usual.

On the first pass of a cart by our table, we snagged some delightfully crisp and lacy deep-fried taro dumplings with pork, shrimp-stuffed fried eggplant (slightly greasy but very tasty nonetheless), and some steamed and pan-fried pork and chive dumplings. Next up were some delicate har gow shrimp dumplings, a delicious cold salad of thinly-sliced squid in a sesame dressing, and some BBQ pork (on the sticky-sweet side, but quite good nonetheless).

Following these, we tucked into some more hearty and glutinous fare: a homey dome of sticky rice with Chinese sausage and chewy, crispy, lava-hot deep-fried pork dumplings made of glutinous rice dough (ham sui gok). Thinking some vegetables might be in order, we got ourselves a plate of Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce. Perfectly good, but who goes out for dim sum to get their daily servings of greens? We’re saving our pennies for the fun stuff next time.

Time for dessert… When one of us was a lad way back in the 1970s, his parents would occasionally prepare Chinese dishes in their suburban home in Nashville, Tennessee (thanks, Mom!). These meals would occasionally be followed by refreshing cubes of almond-flavored gelatin. Fung’s offers the exact same thing, topped with a spoonful of good old syrupy fruit salad. On the more spectacular side were Fung’s salted egg custard buns. These rich yellow cakes each contain an ample glob of salty-sweet, eggy goodness. Get yourself some of these if you see them rolling by!

We left Fung’s fully sated by our holiday meal, full of respect for a kitchen that can turn out over 100 dishes at once with such consistently-high quality. Dim sum at Fung’s is exactly the sort of scene we view as a major upside of living in a city that has the massive diversity and population to support this kind of dining. As mentioned above, it is not possible to do much more than scratch the surface in one visit. There were simply too many items rolling by on the carts to take a significant sampling, not to mention a hot bar with steam tables full of such delicacies as shellfish and chicken feet (we are not big chicken foot fans ourselves, but have heard that Fung’s makes good ones). If you can, gather a large group with varying tastes for your visit and occupy one of the large family-sized tables. On ordinary non-holiday weekdays, Fung’s dispenses with the dim sum carts and provides a picture menu of the available items, which are prepared to order. We hope to return soon for a more focused dim sum experience, selecting a range of varied items from the menu. And, of course, there are tanks of crustaceans and an entire dinner menu awaiting a celebratory occasion.