Dim-sum at its brightest

Dim-sum is unlike any eating experience you have at a typical restaurant, a chaotic yet gratifying experience. Hailed as one of the best places for dim-sum in Chinatown, Ocean Harbor serves dim-sum during brunch hours, usually on weekends.

Having a successful dim-sum meal at Ocean Harbor requires delicate calculations. Go with three or four people, but not much more, because on a busy Sunday morning, the wait could be longer for larger parties. Bring at least one person who has ordered dim-sum before. You should order water as soon as you sit down because it is very unlikely that a waiter will come around to ask you again. Finally, stop every cart that goes by, because you don't want to miss a good dish.

Ocean Harbor has food-runners pushing around carts that deliver a consistently good mix of dishes the whole time. The dishes are appetizer-sized and consist of a variety of steamed dumplings, fried items, rice-cake stuffed with meat or vegetables and desert. If you've eaten dim-sum before, Ocean Harbor serves all the typical entrees you would expect. For six people and about 20 small plates, the bill came out to around $80.

One of the best dishes is the chang-fen, shrimp wrapped in wet rice noodles and covered with a sweeter soy sauce.

On the fried front, the tofu fried with shrimp along with the shrimp toast dish wrapped in a type of rice cake was refreshingly crispy with enough texture and softness to delight you. The fried taro cake, a type of potato covered with crumbled flakes was just as good as any other dim-sum restaurant. The thick rice cake wrapped with vegetables and mixed-meats was bland, but dousing the dumpling in soy sauce solved that problem.

On the steamed-dumpling arena, the shu mai - steamed ground pork dumpling - and ha gow - a shrimp dumpling wrapped in a sticky dough - were both gratifying. Some of the other dumplings, like shaolin bao wrapped in mashed meat, just weren't as good.

The carts served up a variety of other dishes including jellyfish, marinated and steamed chicken feet, cow stomach, and to top it off, dessert dishes like custard and flavored jelly.

The range of dim-sum dishes you can expect to eat at Ocean Harbor is extensive, and some are very good - you just have to choose the right ones. However, amid all the chaos of carts running around, unhelpful waiters and food-runners, crowds of people, and having to awkwardly split tiny dishes with your friends, it can be hard to distinguish Ocean Harbor from other decent dim-sum restaurants.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.