Review: Mr. Dim Sum is a welcome addition to Westfield Southcenter

People are falling in love with Mr. Dim Sum.

It’s not only because this Chinese restaurant, located inside Tukwila’s Westfield Southcenter mall, boasts a large dumpling menu (it does) or a sleek space (ditto). A big part of Mr. Dim Sum’s allure: The restaurant has made dim sum more accessible than any Seattle-area Cantonese banquet hall before it.

You can always find parking here, with 6,916 parking spaces at Westfield Southcenter. And instead of lining up outside the doors of the restaurant, those who are wait-listed just wander into the mall until the host texts to say the table is ready.

Even better, Mr. Dim Sum runs the same dumpling-and-rice-roll menu from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday-Saturday, and until 8 p.m. Sunday. That’s a deviation from service during brunch alone, as is tradition at many dim sum parlors.

All told, Mr. Dim Sum has offered a more efficient take on this Chinese brunch staple since debuting in September.

The dumpling dishes here are quite good. There are triangle-shaped shrimp and chive morsels that have been fried until the shell crackles but before it gets greasy. Har gow filled so generously that they’d barely squeeze into a teacup. Crispy fried pot stickers with a plump belly of aromatic pork meatball.

Mr. Dim Sum also does an excellent take on fried rice rolls, a classic Chinese street food that’s become trendy around Seattle. Here, the main ingredient — little more than a blank canvas of soft, wide rice noodle that’s been rolled upon itself like a blanket — gets charred in the wok and caramelized in XO sauce. This dish is fantastic, imbued with the smoky hei flavor of the wok.

Outside the classics, a showy dish here that you won’t find on your standard dim sum pushcart is the crispy rice roll with shrimp and nori.

It’s a bundle of rolls of snappy shrimp nestled in a crunchy tempura batter. The bundle then gets wrapped a second time, in a semisweet, mochilike blanket. It’s a whorl of different textures — the crunch of the tempura, the soft-chew of the outer wrapper, the snap of the shrimp. A dusting of seaweed atop this shrimp log evokes the faintest taste of the sea.

This is Mr. Dim Sum’s signature plate, its most intricate and best dish. It arrives on a raised pedestal — and it’s the priciest dim sum item on the menu ($12.95).

While some have griped about prices, Mr. Dim Sum aspires to be a destination for dining, like Sun Sui Wah in Bellevue. The prices, hovering around $8 for three to four dumplings, skew about a buck higher than South End dim sum prices in the past. But that’s the going rate around Seattle and the Eastside these days.

The menu looks like it was cribbed from any number of contemporary hot spots in Richmond, B.C., the dim sum capital of North America. Visually, Mr. Dim Sum dons the aesthetic of many trendy Asian bistros on the West Coast: There are hard, black-and-white surfaces and recessed lighting in the high ceiling. Taylor Swift songs cascade over the 150 seats. There’s a stylized, pagodalike roof over the bar, where the Seahawks play on the big screen. And instead of just cognac and baijiu behind the bar, as is the standard at many first-generation Chinatown haunts, you’ll also find tequila and Maker’s Mark.

Not every dish works at Mr. Dim Sum. For a restaurant that aims high, the kitchen still struggles with consistency at its steam station. On two visits in recent months, the shells of the dumplings were perfectly pliant; on a third visit, the same order emerged from the kitchen mushy.

Still, Mr. Dim Sum plans to add more dishes to its 106-item menu when it should be dialing back. I can suggest a few to nix.

Its stodgy Chiu Chow-style steamed dumpling (pork, dried shrimp, peanuts and shiitake mushroom) lacks the fermented zing of this classic Guangdong nosh. Its Peking duck is a greasy travesty, served at room temperature with the fat still congealed. And the gamey roast squab was so bone-dry that the boney bird was tough to get down.

Overall, though, the food rates a rung or two higher than most Chinese banquet halls around Puget Sound. There are about four excellent dishes for every clunker, which is a good ratio for a bustling dim sum hall.

Some stellar Cantonese small plates to try: creamy, pan-fried taro squares with lacy, charred edges; stewy honeycomb tripe, redolent with sherrylike aromas; and citrusy, steamed beef meatballs that weren’t meatloaf-mealy like other inferior versions around town.

Wondering what seafood dishes to get? Try the mustard walnut prawn with a sharp, horseradishlike tinge, and two takes on fried shrimp rolls — one as a traditional egg roll and the other wrapped in a crackly, wispy bean curd.

But the talker at Mr. Dim Sum, at least among its college-age clientele, is the trio of deep-fried golden custard dessert balls. Each ball is an orb of purple potato with an exterior studded with crunchy flakes, cocooning a molten, milky egg yolk.

This odd, lovely dinosaur egg with Technicolor filling is the restaurant’s most ambitious and best dessert.

These custard balls are available during dinner, too, not only until 3 p.m. when dim sum traditionally ends at other restaurants. This Chinese spot may not be perfect, but a solid, accessible dim sum operation that’s open at all hours is worth a trek to Tukwila (especially for the custard balls).