The Court Will Resume After Lunch

How about a nice cup of water with that dim sum? One of the joys of jury service in Manhattan is the proximity of the courthouses to Chinatown, which means a tasty dim-sum lunch is something you actually do, not just talk about with office friends. A few weeks ago, after the judge let us out at noon, I headed over to Mott Street in search of a restaurant that wasn’t filled with lawyers and fellow jurors. I wanted authentic and thought I might have found it at a tiny lunch counter where the waitress didn’t speak much English. I ordered a bowl of won-ton soup, which was okay. But the dim sum that followed left me wanting and also quite thirsty. When I asked for a glass of water, it caused confusion. “Water, you know, water, water,” I kept repeating the word, as if the more I said it, the more it would sound Chinese. Finally, she caught on, filled a coffee cup from the tap, and set it before me. The next day, I walked into the most crowded restaurant I could find and was rewarded with a heavenly assortment of dim sum, tangy strips of sauéed kale wrapped in spongy rice-flour cake, and a plate of crunchy spring rolls that, although ordered at random and in somewhat of a panic to get things right this time, turned out to be the perfect complement to the other dishes. Only a few of the large, round tables at the Vegetarian Dim Sum House were ringed in tell-tale suits and ties. The vast majority of diners were casually dressed Chinese whom I assumed to be from the neighborhood—the truest test, I realized, for picking the best place. As I sipped green tea instead of water, I figured that every city must have its “I only eat there when I’m on jury duty” neighborhood, maybe as ethnic as New York’s Chinatown. And I wondered what they might be.