The best dim sum in London
25 places
A. Wong
££££The only two-Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant in Europe, working through the regional cooking of the whole country across a tasting menu.
Dim sum at lunch is a different and far cheaper proposition than the evening tasting menu - the two services barely resemble each other.
Baba Tang
££Topped Time Out's dim sum ranking, with everything made in house - the cheung fun with peanut and XO sauce is the dish people go for.
Bang Bang Oriental Foodhall
£London's largest Asian food hall - more than twenty-five kiosks across Chinese, Malaysian, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese, built as the successor to the much-missed Oriental City that stood on this site.
Zone 4 on the Northern line, so it is a trip rather than a stop-off, and worth going hungry for. Cash-light but busy at weekends; the kiosks turn over quickly.
BaoziInn
££Northern Chinese street food tidied up for London, in a room done out in Communist-era poster kitsch.
Canton Blue
££££Inside The Peninsula, themed on a 19th-century trading ship - the most expensive Cantonese room in London and built to look it.
Dim Sum & Duck
££Dim sum served day and night rather than only until mid-afternoon, which almost nowhere else in London does.
Dim Sum Library
£££Dim sum in a bar-led room rather than a banquet hall, which makes it the one that works for an evening rather than a lunch.
Dragon Castle
££South London's proper dim sum hall - a full-size Cantonese banqueting room at Elephant and Castle, with trolley-era scale and none of the Chinatown mark-up.
Dim sum is served through the day rather than only at lunch, which is unusual. Large enough to take a group without booking far ahead.
Dumplings' Legend
££A glass-walled kitchen on Gerrard Street where the xiao long bao are folded in front of the queue.
Feng Shang Princess
£££A three-tiered Chinese pagoda, painted red and hung with lanterns, moored on the Regent's Canal at Cumberland Basin - hand-built in the 1980s as the first floating restaurant of its kind in London.
Cantonese and Szechuan cooking; the boat is the reason to book rather than the kitchen, and reviews are mixed on the food. About ten minutes' walk from London Zoo's main entrance. Evenings only Monday to Friday; open from noon at weekends.
Golden Phoenix
££A Chinatown Cantonese room that both Time Out and The Hotel Journal single out from a very crowded street.
Hakkasan
££££The basement room on Hanway Place that made high-end Chinese food fashionable in London, and set the template every glossy Chinese dining room since has borrowed from.
Jixiang Baozi
£A counter turning out baozi from bamboo steamers, sold to eat standing up rather than sat down.
Joy King Lau
££Four floors off Leicester Square doing trolley-era dim sum the old way, largely unchanged while the street around it turned over.
Orient London
£££The smart end of Chinatown - several floors on Wardour Street where the room is doing as much work as the trolley.
Park Chinois
££££A 1930s Shanghai supper club recreated on Berkeley Street, with live music downstairs and cabaret rather than a quiet dinner.
Pearl Liang
£££An unexpectedly large basement dining room behind Paddington station, routinely rated above the Chinatown equivalents by people who eat a lot of Cantonese food.
Five set menus, built for a table that wants to share rather than order individually.
Plum Valley
£££A family-run Gerrard Street room in a black-fronted building, doing award-winning dim sum in a smarter setting than most of Chinatown.
Royal China
£££A black-and-gold banquet hall on Baker Street where weekend dim sum runs at the volume of an airport terminal, and the queue is part of it.
No bookings at weekend lunch - the busiest dim sum service in London and it moves fast.
Shanghai Me
££££Lacquered wood and 1930s glamour twenty-eight floors above Park Lane, looking down the length of Hyde Park.
Tao Tao Ju
£££Towering bamboo baskets of steamed and grilled dim sum, made fresh on site each day - the refined end of Lisle Street.
Tattu
£££A Joyce Wang Studio room built as a Chinese courtyard, around a full-size cherry blossom tree.
The only venue here named by two editorial sources and no blog, which is unusual in this corpus.
Yauatcha
£££All-day dim sum with a patisserie counter downstairs, from the Hakkasan founder - it held a star for fourteen years and still cooks like it.
Yi-Ban
££Dim sum over the water at the Royal Docks, trading since 2003 and almost entirely unknown to central London.
If everything else is full
Reliable rather than remarkable. These are chains — worth knowing about when you need somewhere open, not worth a journey.
Din Tai Fung
£££Xiao long bao folded to eighteen pleats behind glass - the Taiwanese chain Ken Hom put in the New York Times' world top ten, and its first London site.