The clamour in this basement canteen is deafening. There’s the jabber of large tables, many of them 10 or more: extended families, animated students, gals on the town, all Chinese. And the seating style is, well, idiosyncratic: empty the place out completely before letting in the next wave. Mei Dim is an exercise in hungry frustration for those of us queueing patiently for a table that never seems to materialise. Then there’s their intriguing bussing technique, which is little short of pulling paper tablecloths from under an avalanche of plates and cutlery and, with the delicacy and finesse of shot-putters, dropping the lot from a great height into a plastic basin.
But, despite changes of ownership and a typically anonymous kitchen, this is where local intel says I’ll find some of Manchester’s best dim sum. Huge laminated pictorial menus show everything from the familiar (prawn har gau) to the more esoteric – kwi fa cake (sic): jelly made from osmanthus and wolfberries. When we finally get seated and manage to order from staff who scurry around studiously ignoring us, food arrives smartly: hot, fresh, vivid.
If on offer, I always order xiao long bao (Shanghainese soup dumplings), as good a barometer as any to dim sum quality, and Mei Dim’s are little belters: almost translucent, springy wheat dough, pork mince humming with ginger and garlic, an intense broth whispering of many bones. They don’t come with the expected ginger-slivered black vinegar, but are fragrant and savoury enough not to need it, and their little tinfoil cupcake cases mean that not a precious drop of soup is lost.
The table’s pork fans are in heaven: there are baked char siu pastries, super-short with lard, the roast meat inside lean and sweet; fat, blowsy potstickers, chewy and yielding; and the inevitable cloud-like steamed pork buns, all sticky with their hoisin and sesame-scented jammy interiors. A mound of glutinous rice comes murky with soy and dotted with smoked pork and pungent Chinese sausage.
For the pork-averse, there are fried knots of crumbly pastry stuffed with a squelch of spring onion; or slithery cheung fun, the rice noodle rolls pregnant with sweetish fried dough. Each bun or dumpling is ticked off a scrawled list with brisk efficiency.
Seafood, too. Those fat, glossy little har gau, crunchy with prawns; long, mild chillies stuffed with squid and prawn and deep-fried (wish I’d ordered three lots of those); crisp-fried prawn balls served with not unpleasingly plasticky mayo. It’s the perfect yum cha adventure, and cheap enough to take risks.
So I’m not sure why the internet is peppered with outraged punters huffing – eg, “Don’t touch this place with a bargepole.” I enjoy Mei Dim as an evocation of what Chinatowns used to be like before businesses realised that we wussy Brits were intimidated by blatant rudeness and decided to adopt a bit of a service ethic and a veneer of design sophistication. I’m reminded of the Chinese waiter in Glasgow who, when I asked for a little flask of hot sake (we did that back then: get us) brought a whole, microwaved bottle. Skint, I protested. He couldn’t replace it, he patiently explained, as it was now “fucked”.
To get any kind of attention, we resort to Michael Winner-ish waving; requests for soy and chilli sauces are ignored, as is pleading for the bill, Nobody tells us you just pay at the cash desk.
The regular menu, too, takes me back to when we thought that sweet-and-sour so luminous it could be seen from Mars was simply what Chinese food was like. We have beef chow mein just to check, and it’s everything a nostalgic could hope for. But roast meats are fine: lacquered ducks, fatty pork belly; and those dim sum are pretty, pretty good – with the exception of tepid turnip cake, greasy beancurd rolls stuffed with biltong-chewy duck, and steamed baby cuttlefish in satay sauce that tastes bitter and freezer-burnt.
If you pine for the kind of arcana that hardcore foodists like to order as badges of honour, all your tripe (blanket or honeycomb), chicken’s feet, whelks in chu hou sauce or pan-fried water chestnut pudding needs will be met. And the bill has us beaming: 60 quid for four of us, and we’re stuffed as comprehensively as fried dough cheung fun.
• Mei Dim 45-47 Faulkner Street, Manchester M1, 0161-236 6868. Open noon–11.30pm (midnight Fri & Sat; 10.30pm Sun). £10-15 a head, plus, er, service
Food 5/10; dim sum 7/10
Atmosphere 1/10 (or 10/10, depending on your tolerance)
Value for money 10/10
