The regular menu takes me back to when we thought sweet-and-sour so luminous it could be seen from Mars was simply what Chinese food was like
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.
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