My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Three Excellent Places for Dim Sum in Walnut Creek, CA

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Three Excellent Places for Dim Sum in Walnut Creek, CA

This is my 20 months of residency here in the Heritage Downtown Walnut Creek. There are three Dim Sum places nearby that I have been to. I love Dim Sum, so the first time I have a chance to get out I dined at Dim Sum Places. These are the three that I have been to:

1. Creek House at Parkside - Have been there 5 times during the last 20 months

https://www.creekhousedimsum.com/_files/ugd/055480_29a73c5ffb104517bb24f800e8f182eb.pdf

2. East Ocean Seafood at Ignacio Valley Rd- Have been there 3 times during the last 6 months

https://www.creekhousedimsum.com/_files/ugd/055480_29a73c5ffb104517bb24f800e8f182eb.pdfhttps://www.creekhousedimsum.com/_files/ugd/055480_29a73c5ffb104517bb24f800e8f182eb.pdf

3. Dumpling Hours at North Main ( Downtown)- My first time the other day with Ditas and Carenna

https://www.yelp.com/biz/dumpling-hours-walnut-creek

The above three places are great for Dim Sum. Each restaurant has different vibes and slightly varied menu. My favorite dishes are the soup dumplings, pork buns, hot and sour soup and Fish with Black Bean Sauce. I am attaching the websites and reviews of the three Dim Sum Places. If you have been to any of these places let me know what you think of their Dim Sum offerings.

At the Dumpling Hour: During Carenna and Ditas visit ( Dec27), I ordered their Scallion/Ginger Noodles, Soup Dumplings💚, Siomai and the Hot and Sour Soup, and the Flower Tea for Drink. It was excellent.

At the Creek House Last Week: On My Birthday ( Dec 20), Dodie, Ruth and I ordered their shrimp Siar Gao, egg rolls, hot and sour soup, pork spare ribs with black bean sauce, pork buns, sesame balls and egg custard. It was delicious.

At East Ocean: Two Months Ago: Dinah and I ordered: soup pork dumplings, noodles, won ton soup, Sui mai and Shrimp/Crab Dumplings and Barbecue Pork Buns. It was yummy!

I have never been disappointed with the Food I have tasted in the above 3 restaurants. You can also order on line.

Meanwhile, The word dim sum comes from the Cantonese tim sam, "appetizer," or literally, "touch the heart." Definitions of dim sum( noun. traditional Chinese cuisine); a variety of foods (including several kinds of steamed or fried dumplings) that are served successively in small portions.

Here's an Excerpt from a Recent Review of the Dumpling Hours: 💚

"The star of the hour was the soup dumplings, and I feel this place certainly has their soup dumplings down. They even have fancy dumpling soup spoons that some places have nowadays, such as 88 Bao Bao, but I do feel the size of the dumplings here are on the larger side compared to other spots, and of course, the soup in there is just aplenty, and will need to eat with caution using your designated soup spoon. It was delicious!

Overall, Dumplings Hours is not a unique dumpling spot, as there's just so many of them here now in our area. However, I do feel they have one of the better soup dumplings out of the more than handful of places that you can get soup dumplings now in our area. The downside is that it's in the downtown area, not that I don't like the downtown area, but it just difficult to find parking at peak hours, and traffic is not going to be great. Additionally, the adjusted pricing to account for this area also does it no favors. But hey, beggars can't be choosers, and if you're in this area and in the mood for some soup dumplings, hit up Dumpling Hours".

Finally, Here's the list of other (# 4-9) Dim Sum Places in the Walnut Creek Area. I have been also to Dumpling Time in San Ramon #9 (below). Their offerings are also delicious.

4. Peony Garden
3.8 (462 reviews)
$$Open until 9:30 PM
“but surely won't be the last. Overall it is easily one of the best Dim Sumplaces I've been to...” more
5. Aberdeen Cafe
4.3 (169 reviews)
$$Open until 8:00 PM
“Food is excellent, staff is really kind. Best dim sum, despite it being a small selection.” more
6. Yin Ji Chang Fen
3.8 (99 reviews)
$$Open until 8:30 PM
“Not the best dim sum but a nice complement to the Chang Fen and Congee.” more
7. Dumpling and Noodle House
4.5 (251 reviews)
$$Open until 9:00 PM
“My bf and I love getting dim sum, especially when they have the egg yolk buns for dessert on the...” more
8. 88 Bao Bao
4.1 (164 reviews)
$$Open until 9:00 PM
“Love this place, great dim sum and the food is made as you are ordering.” more
9. Dumpling Time
3.7 (523 reviews)
$$Open until 9:00 PM
But my best Dim Sum Experience the last 18 months was when Grand Daughter Alix-Katague-Quinn and new husband, Brendan Quinn treated me for Dim Sum during my last year's birthday at the HongKong Lounge Bistro near their apartment in Fremont St, San Francisco, Ca.

https://hkloungebistro.com/

Lastly, Did you Know That----

The Philippine Trench, one of the deepest parts of the ocean, reaches depths of about 10,540 meters (34,580 feet) in the Emden Deep.
The trench is a result of the complex tectonic activity in the region where the Philippine Sea Plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate.
Despite the extreme depths and pressures, unique and diverse marine life inhabits the trench, adapted to the harsh conditions.
The Philippine Trench has been a significant site for deep-sea exploration, providing insights into geological processes and deep-sea ecosystems.
To put it in perspective, the Philippine Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall, highlighting the vastness and mystery of the ocean's depths.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Three Excellent Places for Dim Sum in Walnut Creek, CA

Finally, Here's the list of other (# 4-9) Dim Sum Places in the Walnut Creek Area. I have been also to Dumpling Time in San Ramon #9 (below). Their offerings are also delicious.

4. Peony Garden

5. Aberdeen Cafe

6. Yin Ji Chang Fen

7. Dumpling and Noodle House

8. 88 Bao Bao

9. Dumpling Time

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