After a pretty favorable dinner experience at the Ducky Wok (on
Harvard Street between Commonwealth Avenue and Brighton Avenue in
Allston--a famously difficult place to park a car, incidentally),
I decided to give it a shot for dim sum, served on Saturday and
Sunday (but from a menu, not from carts). The food was very
good, though the prices were perhaps 20% higher than for
comparable dishes in Chinatown.
The virtue of ordering from a menu is that the food arrives hot.
The disadvantage was that many dishes were translated with
virtually identical English names ("bun with pork," "pork bun,"
"pork dumpling," etc.) so that I felt that I was ordering a bit
more blindly than when I can point to a cart and select a dish.
In this case, the advantage out-weighed the disadvantage, since
nearly every variety of pork bun or dumpling was very tasty.
Special praise to a crabmeat dumpling and (surprisingly) the
sticky rice. I have never really liked this dish, but served
steaming hot, with plenty of mushrooms and meat included in the
rice, I found it perhaps even something that I would order
again.
Oddly, the place was not very crowded when we showed up, at
around 12:30 on a Saturday, but was nearly full by 2:00, when we
left. Many of the patrons seemed to be ordering noodle dishes
rather than dim sum, and these looked very tempting.--RobBoston, MA