Palette Tea Lounge & Dim Sum

Palette Tea Lounge takes over the building once home to Joyful House, evolving into a dim-sum dining destination that feels like more of a social experience than your average Chinatown restaurant. It's an engaging space that balances pops of color in purple furniture and lantern light fixtures with ambient decor, including a water feature that runs through a centralized communal table.

The concept is a San Francisco import by the family behind Koi Palace and Palette Tea House. As the name suggests, artistic touches emerge in the presentations, from a "palette" of colorful sauces (with varying degrees of heat) to the soft plastic syringes that inject butter into the lobster hargow. The restaurant specializes in dim sum staples with the trendy xiaolongbao (soup dumplings) served on spoons — a nice way to slurp up the broth filling in a single easy bite.

The menu is well-rounded and loaded with photos for newbies to easily understand. As always with dim sum, it's best to mix-and-match small bites for a variety of flavors, from egg tarts to sticky BBQ ribs and an assortment of dumplings. Some recipes, including fried rice and rice crepes wrapped around a variety of ingredients, are larger and more filling.

As expected, the tea selection doesn't disappoint, but some choices of American whiskey and other spirits are on standby, which you don't always see in Chinatown — especially in a dim sum restaurant.