Review: Peter Chang Brings Everyday Dim Sum to Annapolis

Sixteen years ago, when The New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin wrote his culinary anthropology piece, “Where’s Chang?” it was not so easy to find acclaimed Chinese chef Peter Chang, who at the time moved from restaurant to restaurant, often without notice, resulting in long Chowhound fanboy detective threads.

These days, however, those of us in the DMV can find the acclaimed chef and restaurateur pretty easily. (This piece could be called, “Where Isn’t Chang?”) In fact, he now owns 18 restaurants, which are often named after him and sport his image in their windows, along with evidence of his James Beard accolades—a showy imprimatur if ever there was one.

This is the case with Peter Chang Annapolis, one of the chef’s latest restaurants, which opened in February. PCA is a light-filled, cheerful, pea-green dining room with a huge bar, pastoral murals on the walls, and two rooms with the round tables and lazy Susans that are the best way to experience Chinese banquets. There’s also an open kitchen with a window where you can watch the chefs make dumplings and operate the Italian-made oven that houses Chang’s signature burnished Peking ducks.

This location also offers their all-you-can-eat dim sum brunch menu every day. (Baltimore’s NiHao only offers it on the weekend.) Chang has instituted his dim sum brunches at many of his restaurants—the practice started in Bethesda’s Q by Peter Chang—where diners can draw from his lengthy list of dumplings, bao, shumai, noodles, and small plates, all for a set price.

The new Annapolis location takes that trend one step further, expanding it from a weekend brunch concept to an everyday focus; this is also, happily, a trend in Chang’s other Mid-Atlantic restaurants.

I’m not usually a fan of the all-you-can-eat restaurant concept. Too many traumatic memories of Red Lobster shrimp and Las Vegas buffets, plus the inherent problem of, well, just too much food. That said, the AYCE dim sum brunch at NiHao has been life-changing for many Baltimoreans, offering all the xiaolongbao bamboo baskets and mapo tofu possible at an affordable price. The portions are helpfully small, so it’s not so much an impossible feast as an opportunity to try a bit of everything and then center down on guilt-free dumplings.

Dim sum traces its origins to teahouse snacks served to Silk Road travelers, but it came into its own in 19th-century Hong Kong, where teahouses featured roving carts bearing repeating dumplings and various small dishes. Chang came to the U.S. not from Hong Kong, but from a farming town in Hubei, and then a culinary school in Wuhan. He cooked at luxury hotels and won cooking competitions, and eventually moved to the U.S., where he was chef at the Chinese Embassy in D.C., then moved, enigmatically, through various DMV restaurant kitchens before building his own small empire and winning a slew of awards.

The Annapolis restaurant also recently started featuring to-go-only bento boxes, the terrific Japanese mainstay, here with a Sichuan twist. They’re a marvelous way to get lunch if you don’t have time to spend an hour and a half eating chile-oil wontons.

Of course, Chang’s Annapolis location has more than just dim sum and bento boxes. There are the magnificent set pieces, notably those Peking ducks, a classic Beijing dish that has long been a feature of Chang’s restaurants and which arrive lacquered on a platter, along with crepe-like pancakes and a zesty plum sauce. There are also many of the chef’s other signature dishes, including the whole branzino, thatched with ginger scallions; the dry pot spicy pork belly; the beautifully arranged, intensely colorful dragon eggplant; and Grandma’s noodles—hand-pulled strands doused with house chile sauce, vinegar, garlic, and scallions.

The Annapolis restaurant, executive-cheffed by Chungang Shi (all Chang’s restaurants are overseen by him but have their own executive chefs, who tilt the menus to their own tastes and creativity), specializes in seafood, particularly local catfish. Thus, Chesapeake blue catfish is featured—in bowls with chile sauce, in noodle soups torqued with sprigs of Sichuan peppercorns, in a sour cabbage broth, as well as in a stone pot. Specific to Annapolis is also a gloriously meaty porcini-and-duck rice pot.

All of Chang’s restaurants have excellent bar menus featuring creative cocktails, often highlighting baijiu, the Chinese sorghum-based liquor, as well as Chang’s own labeled beer, a rice lager brewed by Baltimore’s Mobtown Brewing Company.

So there is much to love in this new outpost—let us not forget the seasonal specials, which recently included two dishes featuring bullfrog. But the standouts remain that dim sum spread, loaded with soup dumplings, chile-spiked wontons, shrimp shumai, dan dan noodles, duck-stuffed bao, plus his signature scallion bubble pancakes handball-sized domes of inflated pastry served with sauces.

Sitting at table, with or without the brunch mimosas, pots of hot tea, or the sublime black-sesame egg-yolk bao (please order this, even if you think you can’t eat anymore), is a study in what an excellent brunch can be—in the absence of too many Bloody Marys and orders of eggs Benedict.

Chang’s new Annapolis restaurant may be in a nondescript concrete universe outside of Maryland’s capital city, but inside is the utterly lovely world of Sichuan food, all those teahouse-inspired banquets—and maybe a bento box to take over the Bay Bridge to the beach.

PETER CHANG ANNAPOLIS: 918 Bay Ridge Rd, Annapolis, 410 558-6958. HOURS: Mon.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-3 p.m., 4:30 – 9; Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. PRICES: AYCE dim sum, $30; bento boxes, $14.95-18; entrees $48-15; Peking duck, $40-78. AMBIANCE: Modern Sichuan and Hong-Kong-style teahouse.