Luk Yu Tea House (陸羽茶室), Stanley Street, Central

Luk Yu Tea House (G/F - 3/F 24-26 Stanley Street, Central, tel : +852 2523 5464) as I gather is an institution for traditional Chinese food in this parts. I've never really heard of them until the past couple of years and it seems that apart from what they are, the place is also famous because of the gun down of a businessman by a hitman from the triad. Maybe the spirit still lingers somewhere.

The food?  It was okay based on a sampling of dim sum. Wouldn't say that these are the tastiest that I've had. To be fair, I've to mentioned that I had been informed prior to the visit that they best items that they do requires pre-order and that one should visit in large groups to appreciate as in most Chinese restaurants.

These are baked char siew buns. The exterior is like bread, not the skin of the traditional steamed variety.

They tasted pretty much like how they looked. With their savoury and sweet blend of char siew bits.

This was some pastry, I don't remember what it's called. The fillings contain minced duck and bits of pineapple.

The pastry itself was okay. What didn't work for me was the fillings. In spite of what it's been named for, I could hardly taste the duck. The bits of pineapple were meagre and most of the flavour came from dried shrimps.

These are some sort of liver siew mai. Meat balls beneath butterflied pork liver. Those meat balls taste like what one gets in siew mai. The livers were just livers. Nothing exceptionally good or bad about them.

Their regular siew mai was pretty decent though.

Har gao here was pretty bad. These were quite small and on top of that, had thick skins. I'm not sure how traditional are those thick skins, but I guess that most people enjoy the more refined renditions with thinner skin and more generous fillings. To be honest, I could hardly identify the insides as shrimp.

Those above are almond rolls. They're texture like rice rolls, with more bite. Something like the Nonya kueh lapis. The flavours of almond are all over the rolls and I thought they were pretty good. The potions looked pretty large, but those rolls went down with relative easy and wasn't heavy at all.

I'm pretty sure that these weren't a representative of what Luk Yu can do, but it's what we had and I didn't feel that it was impressive enough that'll get me clamouring back. Institution or not.