Restoran Pin Ming Xuan (品茗轩广式茶楼), located along Jalan Serigala near to KSL City Mall, is never without a queue whenever I walked past the restaurant. An opportunity arose and I brought a couple of friends to wait it out on a Friday morning — with a 40-minute wait. We just have to try it at least once!
Pin Ming Xuan is a Cantonese dim sum restaurant with a pretty wide range of dim sum dishes — most of the typical dishes that I could think of were on the menu.
We ordered 9 dishes and a pot of Chinese pu'er tea (普洱茶) — too few dishes for 3 pax?
The first few dishes to arrive were Shanghai soup dumplings (小笼包), phoenix feet with PMX sauce (酱皇蒸凤爪), steamed char siew cheong fun rolls (叉烧肠粉), steamed char siew bun (秘制开口叉烧包) and shrimp siew mai (蚧子烧卖皇).
"Phoenix feet" — an elegant name for chicken feet — has always been my favourite dim sum dish and I will always order it. I believe "PMX sauce" is Pin Ming Xuan's special sauce. The simmered phoenix feet is delicious and not salty.
The shrimp siew mai (meat dumpling) has fresh and crunchy prawns topped with shrimp roes. Meaty, crunchy and really nice!
Next to be on the table were the pan-fried chives dumplings (香煎韭菜锅贴) and Hakka-style stuffed egg-plant (酿茄子).
Followed by a soup dish, named "simmered skin roll in fresh soup" (上汤鲜竹卷), that none of us had tried before. It was shrimp dumplings wrapped in beancurd skin and served in savoury soup rather steamed.
Last to come was stir-fried radish cake (特色炒萝卜糕) with eggs, bean sprouts and using a special sauce. There were quite a lot of eggs. Of all the 9 dishes, this is the only dish without meat but it was quite large in portion.
To sum it up, all the dishes were nice and nothing to pick about — my picky friends agreed too. I will be back for more of Pin Ming Xuan's dim sum on weekdays when there are lesser people and probably arrive much earlier in the morning.
Address:
Pin Ming Xuan Cantonese Dim Sum (品茗轩广式茶楼)
10, Jalan Serigala, Taman Century Garden, 80250 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
Opening Hours:
8am to 4pm (Fri ~ Mon starts at 7:30am) | Daily