INTRODUCTION

One of the handy facts about having friends where I visit on holiday is that I can get local tips what I might otherwise have missed. My friend works in Christchurch city centre and as a result is pretty familiar with what it has to offer in terms of decent places to have lunch. The High to Hereford Food Hall (which more than likely gets its name from its High Street location, intersecting Hereford Street) offers various choices of cuisines, from fish and chips to pasta, Greek, Japanese, Malaysian, Singaporean and Chinese. One place my friend recommended was the Dim Sum City stall, and so it was that we met him for lunch one day during our city stay in Christchurch.

DIM SUM CITY

Nestling amongst the hugely cosmopolitan choices in this gleaming new food hall is Dim Sum City, through the High Street entrance and to the right, past the Robert Harris coffee shop. At the front of the stall you could see the dim sum baskets in a glass case, as well as the menu hung over the top. The hall itself is a large building with pristine shiny white tiled floor with lots of small white tables for 4 with metal chairs lining the entrance hallway, which at the end of is where this stall is. Further into the hall are the majority of the outlets, some with tall seats around the counters, and many more tables. It got quite crowded at the noon time that we chose to dine, getting quieter as the lunch hour drew to a close. All the stalls had signs of identical style, which standardised everything. This was good to give a unified look, although personally I preferred the individualistic and older styles of the hotch potch of eateries at Food Alley in Auckland, but this place looked infinitely more modern, and had a lot of light coming in.

THE FOOD

We ordered several dim sum dishes to share between the 3 of us. The order was brought to us in several stages as we sat close to the stall.

Steamed chicken rice - a large plate of rice with soy sauce drizzled over it was accompanied by dark pieces of chicken meat. The rice had some ginger in it with gave it a pleasant taste to go with the saltiness of the soy. It was nicely steamed and very tasty. The chicken was lean and of good quality with a decent taste to it. This was a pretty simple dish very well made.

Shrimp and spinach dumpings - although these didn't taste so much of spinach, these small dumplings were nice, with crispy shrimps inside the steamed parcels.

Shrimp dumping - a good example of another simple dish, just seasoned shrimps inside dim sum pastry. Pretty standard dim sum fare really.

Vegetarian buns - filled with minced vegetables in a thick dough casing, these were pretty nice.

BBQ Pork buns - I didn't try these but I am told that they were good.

CONCLUSION

This was a very good lunch which I enjoyed a lot. I would recommend this food hall in general, and Dim Sum City in particular. At $23 (about £12) for enough dim sum to feed 3, you can't argue with the price or the quality.

CONTACT DETAILS

Dim Sum City,
High to Hereford Food Hall,
266 High Street,
Christchurch,
New Zealand.