Chris E.
Yelp
We drove about an hour to get here on a cold, windy, rainy Saturday morning and, well, we should have took the weather as sign because, disappointingly, our 1st time here was ... well ... you guessed it, a disappointment.
I say this like a broken record, but I grew up in NYC and went to every good dim sum restaurant known to every dim sum aficionado in the 5 boroughs, as well as across the U.S. and abroad, and we just have not seen many NJ dim sum restaurants live up to it's easternly neighbor's standard.
We were really hoping Wonder would be one of the few to be just as good as any dim sum restaurant we've been to, but, most of the main dim sum dishes just lacked flavor. Rarely, do we ever complain or does ANYONE complain about lack of salt in Chinese food, but, for some reason, most of the dishes we ordered was lacking that.
From the dim sum carts (which I do love when they're going around), we ordered shrimp dumplings/har gow, pork dumplings/siu mai, chicken feet, turnip cake, shrimp rice noodle rolls, beef rice noodle rolls, molten egg custard buns, BBQ pork buns, spring rolls, stuffed eggplant and stuffed peppers, chive and shrimp dumplings and sticky rice. Let's just say they had a lot of the usual suspects you can order, which was nice to see.
Most of the dim sum was just OK and some of it was downright ehhhh. I will say there were 2 major highlights though - the molten egg custard buns were smokin' hot, specifically the egg custard, which is what you hope for when you bite into that nice soft bun. The 2nd highlight was the BBQ pork bun. I mean, my goodness, it might have been one of the top 2-3 BBQ pork buns I ever had, period! It didn't hurt that it was served super fresh and that the BBQ pork was steamin' hot. Also, the buns were glazed and sticky with some sweetness, which actually made a world of difference. Both are most gets in my opinion.
Overall, service was friendly inside and there were multiple carts circling while we were there. We arrived only a few minutes after they opened for service at 11am and easily got a table without a wait and, in fact, there was such quick turnover that we only saw a few people actually wait a little bit for a table. It was actually quite shocking that there was really no wait at all on a Saturday afternoon. Not sure if it's like that every weekend, but, if you're looking to be able to sit down right away for dim sum, this is your spot - just be prepared to know that it might be a bit sub-par depending on your experience and standards.