Mongkok Dim Sum (Cheong Chin Nam)

Contrary to its name, Mongkok Dim Sum offers more than dim sum: there is also a wide variety of zichar dishes, and my favourite would have to be their Geylang Lor 9 Beef Horfun ($7.50 for small, $15 for medium). The black bean sauce is very flavourful, the beef is tender and the horfun is full of wokhei. Good stuff!

There are also many other zichar items to choose from, such as 3 Eggs Spinach, Sambal Kangkong, Lala Beehoon, Salted Fish Fried Rice, Pandan Chicken and Salted Egg Pork Ribs. While these are common zichar dishes, they are generally executed well.

The dim sum is good too. The Steamed Pork Belly with Preserved Vegetables($9.50) is soft and savoury. The Pan Fried Carrot Cake ($4.50) is crispy and fragrant. My other favourites include Chee Cheong Fun with Shrimp ($4.80), Fried Mantou ($4.20) and Custard Buns ($4.50).

Even though this is located at the busy F&B stretch along Cheong Chin Nam Road, it is quite easy to get a table whenever we walk in for dinner on Saturday evenings. Great option if you can’t decide between zichar and dim sum!

[ Food Review — This time, zichar dishes! (You can find my older review of their dim sum items on my insta!) ] Think we are completely sold on the idea of having dim sum at night! And what’s better is even if we wanted s o m e versus an entire dinner’s worth of dim sum, we can do that at Mongkok Dim Sum too!

So that’s precisely what we did tonight!

To start, we ordered the Spinach Dumplings (our fav item from our last visit), Siew Mai (gotta love decently priced, good-sized siew mai…with shrimp!), and Fried Mantou with Chilli Crab Dip. (Dim sum make for great starters because they’re bound to arrive before your main dishes anyway, and they help whet your appetite too!)

The mantou was pretty good — sweet and light + crisp without being oily! While the chilli crab dip tasted very much like a premix (it’s a lil starchy and had a 1-D sweetness), there was a lot more crab slivers in there than we’d expected! So much so that if we didn’t specifically spoon them up onto our buns, we’d have had a bunch leftover. Pretty nice surprise!

For a place that does so much dim sum, we were surprised at the quality of their zichar! Sure, it isn’t going to be comparable to top-tier zichar spots, but given the amount of ingredients and size of each dish, I’m down for eating here in sweet air-conditioned comfort with dim sum sides than at other mid-range zichar spots.

Our hotplate tofu actually looks like hotplate tofu! (We had a terrible hotplate tofu in the area prior, so this was a huge relief.) The sauce was fine — not amazing, not terrible — but what I really enjoyed was how many tofu we got + how even yet thin the egg layer was! Add on the shrooms, shrimp and chicken, and this is a solid well-rounded dish perf for pairing with rice!

The spinach with trio of eggs was great too! The broth was flavourful with an obvious enough profile of eggs (you’d think this is the baseline, but nope, I’ve been unfortunate enough to have eaten many that taste just like…water). The spinach was fresh and well-cooked, just some tail ends of the stalks that weren’t plucked/snipped, which wasn’t too big a prob.

Even the pork was yummy — I’m just not the biggest fan of the dish to rave about it, but it wasn’t too sweet, nor was it fatty! Kudos!

Last weekend, I went back to this place which I used to visit regularly years ago, and it's still as good. This is one hor fun with wok hei! There aren't many hor fun with good wok hei nowadays, and it has became a norm to expect your hor fun to be just another saucy-starchy kway teow.
🔸
But Mong Kok, which serves dim sum, serves very good beef hor fun. The kway teow is hidden beneath all that 鼓汁 (fermented black soybeans sauce), but those are fierce kway teow with lots of wok hei. Lift the noodles up like in this photo, and you can see the wok-char on the strands of the kway teow.
🔸
And since the noodles are hidden under the gravy each time it's served, it's always hot when you start eating it... And you can see the smoke radiating from my kway teow here. This came with spicy black bean sauce, so you will get many fiesty mouthful of this beef hor fun.

Totally unimpressed by these supposed lava-flowing buns which turned out to be mini paus with a rather tough dough and what sort of felt like a frozen filling made to be heated upon request. Other than being clumpy and not even flowy, the custard filling had a milky, sweet corn taste. Disappointed since it’s thought to be one of the highlights here. I would rather just have the beef hor fun.

It came as a surprise that being a dim sum place, Mongkok Dim Sum serves quite a tasty beef hor fun. Tossed in a starchy, peppery thick gravy, I could already smell the strong wok hei coming from the hor fun that was stir fried prior to the drenching of gravy. In addition, the tender beef slices were rather large in size which was a bonus. Probably one of the dishes you mustn’t miss here.

This dish was a huge surprise as I never thought cereal prawn could be crispy and soft at the same time. Super worth dish at only $16 and each prawn is large and juicy; not forgetting the crispy and soft batter.