When I arrived before my Mom, I asked the waiter about special birthday buns served at Chinese dinners. The spacious dining room is set up for large family dinners, surrounded by decorative paintings and some aquariums filled with fresh seafood. The restaurant is conveniently located on Webster Street a few minutes after you come out of the Webster/Broadway tunnel from Oakland. In fact, when we went on a Saturday night, there were a couple of birthday parties on our side of the restaurant and a wedding on the other half. And it seemed like everyone having a party these days go to East Ocean. I haven’t been to this Hong Kong-style Chinese restaurant, but I’ve heard good things about their dim sum. I had the task of finding an appropriate place, so for a central location for all the relatives, I zeroed in on East Ocean Seafood Restaurant in Alameda. When my Mom was in town, it was also around the time of her birthday so she had a birthday celebration with her relatives in the Bay Area. The golden, baked sweet buns with a coconut-honey filling are a delicious dessert.Reservations, major credit cards accepted

Sticky rice wrapped in a lotus leaf is filled with juicy roast pork, sausage and creamy mashed mung beans, steamed beef balls have a sweet, spongy texture and their classic pork dumplings are topped with fish roe. Select kitchen items, like sauteed green beans with tofu are spooned hot from a clay pot atop one of the roving carts. But once you're seated, servers are quickly making the rounds, so it'll be no time before you've got a bamboo steamer basket of fresh dumplings on your table. If you decide to come on a Sunday, be ready to take a number and wait at least a half-hour in the small foyer or courtyard. It's also located within a shopping center - Cupertino Village - and a welcoming wooden archway gives way to their vast main dining space. Per the recommendations of the dim sum aficionados in our group, we stopped by the Joy Luck Palace afterwards for lunch. On a dim sum-themed bike ride several years ago, some cycling friends and I ventured down the peninsula for an annual bike swap that takes place in Cupertino. For a tasting platter, try the dim sum sampler with vegetarian pot stickers, pork shao mai, shrimp dumplings made with Yin Hao jasmine green tea and steamed buns. But the Berkeley spot - perched above the gourmet food complex Epicurious Garden - is a quiet sanctuary with an outdoor patio that's perfect for sampling their Dragon Well dumplings, pumpkin or pork shao mai or green onion pancakes. Despite the fact that they've been serving dim sum, hand-pulled noodles and other entrees produced with locally-sourced, organic ingredients for several years ( and that tea and dim sum go hand-in hand), the Imperial Tea Court doesn't seem to register on the local foodie radar when it comes to dumplings or fried turnip cakes. Whenever I tell friends that you can order delicious dim sum at the San Francisco or Berkeley locations of the Imperial Tea Court, they're always surprised.

Their extensive colorful menu offers a variety of dishes highlights include the lamb buns that arrive sizzling over a bed of onions and scallions in a clay pot stir-fried, garlicky green beans with tender morsels of pork and chili pepper succulent, deep-fried pork ribs glazed with maple butter and served in a large coffee mug over a thick, sweet chocolaty-espresso sauce spinach-scallop dumplings swimming in a spicy Sichuan sauce.Ĥ288 Dublin Blvd. Even on a weekday, bow-tied waiters and servers decked out in black-and-red visors briskly weave through the tables with trays and carts attending to the busy lunch rush as quickly as they can. Take the escalator up to the second level of the mall, walk through the glowing Moon Gate and if you're lucky, you won't have to wait too long for a seat in one of their spacious dining rooms. Koi Palace in Daly City is the flagship location of this mini-dim sum empire, but the Dublin location in the Ulferts Center matches its predecessor in quality.

East ocean alameda dim sum menu