The White Swan hotel is a 28-story luxury hotel overlooking the Pearl River. Opened in 1983, it is Guangzhou’s first truly five star hotel and in 2015 a massive renovation was completed. It is also a culinary destination in Guangzhou as it features a number of high-end restaurants including a Michelin-starred venue.
They even have a waterfall in the lobby.
The visit
In late January 2019, along with three friends I had a Sunday dim sum in the Hongtu Hall restaurant, the largest dining venue in the hotel overlooking the river. On weekends, they serve the same dim sum menu also in the Jade River restaurant located upstairs (it is the Michelin-starred one).
Dim sum is super popular in Guangzhou and Sunday morning is the busiest time for dim sum. We were handed our tickets and waited around half an hour to get a table in the busy dining room. Number progression was shown on a screen.
With a touch of class, the tea was professionally poured by a waitress.
Various dim sum dishes soon began to reach the table. One of the first was stewed chicken feet. It is an extremely popular dish, but I had to give a pass. I yet have to become acquainted with chicken feet, even if they seem to enjoy a great deal of popularity everywhere in East and South East Asia.
Then we had an excellent crispy egg tart (on the left) and a crispy crumbling pastry called sachima (on the right). This type of pastry originated in North East China and is now popular nationwide. It is made of fluffy strands of fried batter bound together with a stiff sugar syrup, but the result is not too sweet. It was the first time I had it.
Turnip cake. Always nice.
Classic shrimp dumplings. Very tasty.
Baked pork buns with minced pork. This dish had a delicately sweet backtaste.
Steamed rice flour.
The swan-shaped dim sum was a pastry filled with chestnut paste.
A very special dish that we shared was a portion of sun flower chicken. The chicken was served cold and what is special is that it is a chicken mainly fed with sun flower seeds. It is difficult to describe, but there is indeed something special about this chicken meat. Only drawback was that there was not a lot of meat.
The check
Total check was 1154 RMB (or 172 USD). That was 43 USD per person. This can be regarded as expensive for dim sum, but considering the five star venue the final price seemed quite acceptable.
All the dishes were excellent, I could rank them as one of the best dim sum I ever had. The menu is very extensive, so it is a very good idea to go as a party to enjoy more variety.
Where in Guangzhou:
No.1, Shamian South Street.
In Chinese: 中国广州荔湾区沙面南街1号
Website: http://www.whiteswanhotel.com/en