Back when I was the food and drink staff writer at Time Out New York, I pitched a story about going behind the scenes at a dim sum restaurant to find out exactly how they prepare such vast quantities of dumplings and other small plates to feed the weekend hordes. Most of the big dim sum halls I approached in the city refused to let me observe in the kitchen, but the folks at Pacificana, located out in the booming Chinese section of Sunset Park, greeted me with wide-open doors.
Let’s stop for one second to do some back-of-the-envelope math. Pacificana seats about 500 people, and on weekends the place is totally full. They can easily flip those seats two or three times on busy days, which means that, conservatively, they’re feeding over a thousand people each day. And I’d wager that each person, on average, eats at least three dumplings. (I eat several times more than that, but I’m not a typical customer.)
