Triumphal Palace opened in the modern Alhambra Regency Plaza on June 17, 2005, and there was an instant frenzy, with lines out the door. The madness has died down some, but it’s still worth arriving early to eat some of the best dim sum in Los Angeles. Unlike most spots, Triumphal Palace utilizes a checklist instead of carts, leading to a more user-friendly experience.

Triumphal Palace offers clean, modern decor, to match the food. These tubes (an empty wine rack?) line a wall near the bar.

I’m going to start with the big guns and work my way down the line. Here’s a superlative off-the-menu item: BBQ pork. Cooked until a deep mahogany, incredibly tender and luscious, these slices of hog were practically caramelized, just terrific, and surprisingly lean. In China, 8 is considered a lucky number, so it was no surprise the pork was so tasty at $8.88.

Hidden beneath the pork were these sultry baked soy beans, swimming in pork juice.

Another specialty was the crisp-skinned BBQ roast duck, served with a dish of sweet dipping sauce. The former quacker featured luscious flesh and the standard Triumphal Palace trio of garnishes.

These pan-fried crab cakes were very light and moist, bound with spicy flecks of green pepper, served atop cubes of fresh papaya, an innovative and tasty preparation.

The pan-fried turnip cakes were Best in Show, so it wasn’t a surprised that they tasted even better stir-fried with sprouts, peppers, and scrambled eggs in a spicy XO sauce.

Here are the Triumphal Palace turnip cakes in their original form, tender and crisped on the outside, just oily enough to be flavorful, but not the greasebombs that haunt dim sum carts throughout town.

This pan-fried Chinese broccoli features juicy florets and snap-fresh stalks, incredible.

Pea tip and seafood dumplings feature skins so thin, they’re transluscent. The seafood is basically mounds of fresh shrimp, fused with pea tips and fish. They’re very good.

This simple cake of pan fried sticky rice came coated with omelette and filled with chunks of silky pork. Sometimes, simple offers the most flavor.

Seemingly every dim sum establishment features the steamed shrimp dumplings known as har gow, but the version at Triumphal Palace features thinner rice skins and fresher shrimp than most.

Baked BBQ pork buns: soft, golden buns filled with the same luscious BBQ pork that appears with the baked soy beans. The buns could use more pork, but I say that about most things I eat. Bottom line: they’re good.

These rice noodles were filled with silky beef and drizzled with soy sauce. They weren’t nearly as gummy as some of the lesser versions I’ve eaten.

This dish featured a ball each of shrimp, chicken, and pork, left to right, all juicy. They could have been a little more flavorful, and I could have done without the bed of chewy fish maw.

These steamed spinach chicken dumplings were fairly dense, fused with slivers of mushroom. The skins were very thin, featuring flecks of spinach.

These potstickers featured thin skins, like every other dumpling in the house, but were a little too dense.

The menu listed these taro dumplings as pan-fried. Unfortunately, they were deep fried, glutinous to the point of being heavy, and filled with ground pork.

Here’s the complimentary dish of chili sauce/spicy mustard, each of which is enough to sear the roof off a mouth.

Related Posts

1. Lunasia – Alhambra, CA - April 19, 2009
2. Noodle House – Monterey Park, CA – Wednesday, July 16, 2008
3. Din Tai Fung Dumpling House - Arcadia, CA - August 12, 2006
4. Luscious Dumplings Inc. - San Gabriel, CA - September 21, 2007
5. Ton Kiang - San Francisco, CA - Friday, July 4, 2008

This entry is filed under California, Chinese, Dim Sum House, Los Angeles, San Gabriel Valley, Southern California.