Tim Ho Wan East Village — Restaurant in New York

This place is insanely busy and unless you want to wait 4 hours you'll need to go at off hours. Thankfully, they serve dim sum all day and we managed to snag a table for 2 on a week day afternoon at 5:30pm with only about a 10 minute wait.

OMG! Bonus points. They give you a bowl and not just a stupid flat plate. Every Chinese restaurant outside of North America does this the proper Chinese way - eating out of a bowl. Hallelujah, at least one NYC Chinese restaurant did this right. Also, they give you proper length plastic chopsticks and not the annoyingly short, bent, splinter inducing, pain in the rear-end disposable chopsticks. More bonus points.

The selection of dim sum isn't huge unfortunately, they have most of the popular dishes, with the one big exception of one of my favourites - Woo Gok. Sigh, but at least most everything else tasted good and was done in the right sizes. Not super-sized or teeny-tiny, the correct dim sum sizes. I'm guessing that's due to the HK influence. Everything was constructed correctly. The cha siu bau's weren't the traditional version, instead it was baked instead of steamed, with a crusty sweet outside. It's almost a combination of a cha siu so, but the size of a cha siu bao.

One slight bum note was for some reason the cha siu cheung fun came out lukewarm. I can only assume it got left on the counter for too long before being served. Everything else came out piping hot. Not sure if the temperature also made it somewhat bland tasting too. Though a bit more soy sauce helped somewhat.

The service was mainly pretty efficient, though the tea that I asked for didn't arrive till we'd eaten our sixth plate. Luckily, we were still hungry and ordered another 2 plates.

The restaurant itself is pretty modern, with pictures of the food in lieu of a serving mat, so you know exactly what you're getting. I wonder if that's one of the reasons for the limited menu? The music was a little loud for my taste and pretty unnecessary. As usual it gets mostly drowned out by a roomful of mostly east asians.

So, out of the dim sum places I've been to in NYC I'd have to rate this third behind Hakkasan and Red Farm. But not far off and definitely not as insanely priced as those two restaurants. It is double the price of most Chinatown dim sum places, but it's clean, has reasonable service, no annoying carts, you write your order on an order form and give it to the server and it's close to where I recently moved to - more bonus points! 8)

It's now going to be my go to dim sum place. Cross fingers that Tim Ho Wan opens more branches around NYC and adds Woo Gok to the menu. G'wan, you know you want to...Considering how popular it is and the dearth of very good, reasonably priced, dim sum in the USA the owners can certainly clean up if they get more branches open. Here's hoping the other Chinatown restaurants up their game.

Update 2022/07/04:

The quality seems to have dipped somewhat. Also, was unhappy to see they no longer provide a rice bowl and spoon as standard. They're doing the silly thing of just providing a flat plate. 🙄

The prices have gone up significantly as well, I'm assuming this is due to general inflation problems for all...

Went here a year and a half ago and the service was good and the food was good too. Came back today and I cannot say the same anymore. I read reviews before coming back to Tim Ho Wan, and a couple of the reviews said that the service was bad and that the quality of food went down, which is actually true. The quality of food has went down quite a bit. The har gow was tiny and the skin of it was sticking next to each other that you had to eat the shrimp dumpling by itself without the skin. The sui mai was tasteless and dry and tiny too. The fried dumpling was tiny and the inside meat was flavorless. The chicken feet was a scam because they used skinny chicken feet and it was not soft enough to easily eat like other dim sum chicken feet. Spare ribs were slathered in oil and were flavorless too. The pork buns is what I came for and even the pork buns have gone down in quality. They just slabbed a bunch of sauce in the pork bun which made it taste way too sweet and heavy handed with the soy sauce.The service was terrible. The servers had bad attitudes even though our group was polite. We asked the server if we could order drinks and she walked away telling us we can order drinks when we order our food. ??? Like what ? What kind of service is that? I’ve been a server for a decade and I would never think to treat customers that way. As someone who was a server for a long time I never leave a tip that’s lower than 20% unless I feel disrespected for no reason. Well they definitely did not get 20% for tip. The host was nice and polite but when the servers who get your tips aren’t, there’s no need to come back. The food was basically white washed dim sum and the service is the reason why I’m never coming back. Tim Ho Wan is definitely not a place to eat authentic dim sum. It’s more of a scam where they serve very tiny portions of dim sum dishes. I don’t remember Tim Ho Wan being like this a year and half ago so it’s just really disappointing seeing a good restaurant go so down...

This restaurant is the epitome of ‘you get what you pay for’

This place was horrid, I got the steamed chicken over rice and it came out RAW. There was still pink in the surface. At first, I thought it was cooked and it just looked like that from steaming but I tasted it and it was smooth. My girlfriend got the steamed beef over rice and the beef had the texture of blended oatmeal. What also didn’t help was that the beef blended in with the rice probably due to steaming so she couldn’t even enjoy the rice. When I sent it back they were apologetic but it wasn’t until after everyone was finished with their food for my new one to come out. It was more cooked than previously but still raw on the inside, I am convinced they just popped it in the microwave for 20 minutes and called it a day (I didn’t take any pictures but 7 people can vouch for me). In the end, no refund was added because our group was too tired to fight with the staff.

For a michelin star restaurant this was disappointing. Yes, the price was low but the quality of the food was even lower.

The servers were stoic and did not look happy to be there at all, probably living minimum wage too. It’s not their fault, but whoever is back there managing the kitchen needs to be fired. The actual decent stuff was the dumplings, string beans, and pan-fried noodles—the noodles were burnt by the way so thats really saying something. The interior design was average at best, but I think the food and service helped degrade that.

My girlfriend said, and I quote, “It’s places like these that make me want to be pescatarian.”

I suppose this restaurant did fulfill its purpose—not to satisfy your hunger, but to make it all go away instead.

P.S. If I get salmonella I swear to god I’m suing this...