Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant

I can’t believe that we haven’t done a dim sum review yet! On weekends, we love to go to dim sum and order a few things. In Vancouver, you usually have to make your reservations a day or two in advance. However, we discovered that Sea Harbour doesn’t get too busy until 12:30 onward so it’s our favorite place to go when we forget to make reservations. This weekend, we showed up at 10:00 when they opened and were seated right away. There were only about 5 other tables there at the time. We got much more attentive service than if we had gone during the lunch rush.

Har gao is Howie’s favorite dim sum dish. So he is very happy at the fact that the har gao at Sea Harbour comes in 5 pieces where as traditionally it’s 4 pieces at other places.

You can tell the quality of a good har gao because when you pick it up with your chopsticks, the skin stays intact. There’s large chunks of shrimp in these har gao with little filler. Some restaurants will cheat and put more bamboo shoots in so they can skimp on the shrimp. There’s no need for extra sauce as the har gao pack plenty of flavor on their own.

Every time we have dim sum, we allow ourselves to pick a deep fried dish as our unhealthy treat. Most of the times it is spring rolls! We like theses spring rolls because the skin is very thin. They also always come out very hot which is great because there’s nothing sadder than a cold, soggy spring roll. This is packed with shrimp and has no filler ingredients, just like the har gao.

We order off the English menu when we come and we found it odd that they don’t offer the classic rice roll with shrimp that all dim sum restaurants do. There’s a chance that maybe it’s on the Chinese menu but in any case, we just went with the beef ones.

A master with words, Howie described these rolls looking like “something someone pulled out of the toilet.” Thank you, Howie for ruining the meal for us. But in all seriousness, while it doesn’t look the best I still found it delicious. The rolls were a touch hard to pull apart. However the saving grace was that the meat was tender and the cilantro added a flavor to the dish.

This is one of my favorite childhood dishes and I was disappointed at the quality of these that arrived at our table. The meat was a bit dry and flavorless. I was dunking this into soy sauce they had brought for another dish. I don’t think we’ll be ordering this dish again.

You might remember these steamed pig buns from our Instagram. We decided to try the other cute dessert Sea Harbour had to offer. On the menu, it indicated that we would be getting four coconut pudding rabbits. However, when our dish arrived, we only received two rabbits and the other two pieces were mango piggies.

There’s not much artistry required here. We could’ve easily bought the pudding mixes on our own and poured them into molds. This is definitely a dish to order so you can take a picture of it but in terms of quality, there’s not much of it.

After this dish was brought to our table, we saw the table next to ours glance at it and then order it. We thought it was hilarious that when theirs arrived, the table next to them pointed at it and ordered one for themselves too. Although this was very cute, we won’t be reordering this dish. We will likely go back for the steamed pig buns because those have a delicious creamy yolk center.

Sea Harbour is a nice place in Richmond to get your weekend dim sum fix. The prices are fairly reasonable and the service is good especially if you go earlier when there’s less crowds. If you try it, let us know what you think!