Dim sum with the baby foodbloggers

Lovely flaky egg tarts at Hop Li Arcadia

For some reason I seem to have had more dim sum in the past four months than in the four years before that. This Saturday a group of food bloggers met up at the Arcadia Hop Li, which turned out to be really good for cart dim sum. The food bloggers are ready to launch the next generation of bloggers -- Pam from Daily Gluttony, Jonah from la.foodblogging and Jessica from RitzBites all brought their adorable baby boys. Also there were Pauline (aka Maxmillion) from la.foodblogging, H.C. from LA and OC Foodventures, Josh from FoodGPS, Mattatouille and Javier from Teenage Glutser. The egg tarts were some of the best I've had since the late, lamented Macau Street, the char siu bao were like succulent baby BBQ pork sandwiches, and the "provincial-style" shu mai (right) were interesting and different. And the taro dumplings were far better than at Top Island, with juicy ground pork on the inside and lacy freshly-fried taro on the outside (left). H.C. very helpfully peppered the servers with questions in Chinese about what was in some of the items. The only one I didn't care for was one of the shrimp dumplings, which was giving off a funny off smell. Arcadia is a bit far, but if you want dim sum on the traditional carts, I'd definitely recommend Hop Li.