Moon Kee opened back in October of 2023 selling Cantonese style food and dim sum.  The restaurant traces its origins to the owner’s father, who learned to cook in China in the 1950s and after moving to Hong Kong in the 1960’s, ran a street food stall.  These stalls played a quintessential part of Hong Kong’s food scene in the 1950s and 60s. The menu comes as a book of large plate dishes that include a smattering of American Chinese offerings and a large laminated card that lists the dim sum.  The owner claims that all of the dim sum are made in-house and they never use frozen food.  The steamed rice with Chinese sausage wrapped in a Lotus leaf was delicious. The rice had a mild tea like flavor from the leaf wrapper, with a slight pork flavor from the Chinese sausage and pork embedded in the rice. 

The Dumplings:  The dim sum menu has a lot of dumplings and rice rolls, with four dumplings in each order.  We got the pork soup dumplings, the pork and shrimp shumai, steamed pork and shrimp chive buns, and pan-fried pork dumplings.  The best of the bunch was the chive buns, which have a rice flour wrapper and a delicious chive flavor, think very mild onions with a touch of garlic and grassy herbal notes, in which I could just taste the sweet and savory flavors of the shrimp and pork. The weakest dish was the shumai.  They may have been overcooked, but the wrapper was too thin to hold the pork, shrimp mushroom together. They tasted good, but did not eat well.  The soup dumplings were quite good, sporting wrappers that kept their integrity and contained about a table spoon of tasty, fatty pork soup.  I thought the wrapper on the pan-fried pork dumplings were a little thick, and would have benefited from a stronger browning or charring.  But they were tasty and quite juicy.   

The Location:  Moon Kee is on Broadway between 100 and 101^st, in Mahattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood.  You can reach it via the express 2/3 at 96^th street or the local 1 train at 96th or 103^rd streets.