From Bethesda Magazine: Homemade dim sum takes the stage at Rockville’s Corner Bites
The Chinese eatery serves roasted duck, fried sesame balls and more
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Todd KlimanMay 15, 2026 10:34 a.m.
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Many dim sum lovers have come to fear that the dormancy of the scene is not temporary and has only hardened into a kind of permanent state: a new normal for this beloved meal of small buns, dumplings and tea. The losses, sadly, keep mounting. One of the best, Gourmet Inspirations in Wheaton, survived the COVID-19 lockdown only to close early last year, a casualty of rising costs, labor shortages and the owners’ fatigue. Eight months later, the grande dame of the scene, Hollywood East Cafe in Wheaton, closed, too, after 29 years.
That makes the arrival of Corner Bites, a tight-quartered dim sum spot just north of Rockville Town Center, cause for rejoicing.
Open since August, Corner Bites already stands atop the scene it just joined, and only its relative inexperience keeps me from saying that it might just be the D.C. area’s best spot for dim sum in more than a generation.
And here’s the funny thing: If not for the disappearance of two pillars of the scene in less than a year, Corner Bites might never have come to be.
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The restaurant’s owner, Steven Wu, saw opportunity when Gourmet Inspirations and Hollywood East Cafe closed. He rushed to fill the void, securing a space in Rockville and recruiting Zhuohuan Zhou (aka Sat Joe) to join him as partner and chef.
Joe is a major get, having worked almost exclusively in dim sum for nearly three decades, including at the late Good Fortune in Wheaton and, more recently, at two Peter Chang restaurants—Q in Bethesda and Mama Chang in Fairfax, Virginia. (Wu’s own good fortune was to find that the former chef of Gourmet Inspirations was still on the market, and so he snatched him up, too.)
A great dim sum house is a little like a great French bistro. It’s not novelty and daring that the chef is judged on; it’s the ability to make the familiar and expected feel new and exciting. That’s why Wu’s first act of business was to dispense with the metal pushcarts that, along with lazy Susans and small cups of tea, define Cantonese dim sum culture.
“The carts—that means the food has been steamed twice,” he says. “First in the kitchen and then as it sits.”
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Not here. Joe cooks every dish to order, and no sooner does a plate hit the pass than a server ferries it to your table.
“We want you to taste it at its freshest,” Wu says. “To taste it the way the chefs want it.”
Wu says he made a promise to himself (and to Joe) to forswear a Brooklyn dim sum factory that has grown increasingly popular with restaurateurs, who pass off frozen or premade product as their own.
If you’ve grown disaffected with the generic flatness of most of the area’s dim sum, coming upon these plates is like encountering an old cabinet that’s been stripped of its heavy varnish.
At Corner Bites, the shumai looks, at a glance, like every other version. But dig in and you find a meatball-like filling of pork and shrimp with none of the leaden heft. Or take the har gow. Every dim sum parlor carries a version of these small bundled dumplings, but few are rendered with this degree of delicacy—the thin, semitranslucent wrappers seem likely to tear at any moment but never do.
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This lightness of touch extends across the menu, from the noodle rolls (elongated sheets of rolled pasta, but which are fashioned from rice flour not wheat, and are meant to be a showcase of glutinously chewy texture) to the various stuffed buns, whose pastry is lighter, flakier and richer than that of many bakeries. A variation on the noodle roll theme—in which a mauve-colored rice noodle is draped like a warming blanket atop balls of crunchy fried fish—might have been a disaster, and not just to look at. But the mix of textures proves fascinating and the fish retains its crunch.
When a restaurant can pull off a difficult dish like this, it enables you to settle in and relax, confident that you can order without fear. There isn’t a single section of the long, sprawling menu here that isn’t studded with hits. That’s even higher praise than it might sound, given that many dim sum houses prioritize buns and dumplings, relegating the rest of the menu to the status of slot-fillers.
Here you can roam through the menu freely and without worry. Clay Pot Beef Brisket is so profoundly rich that you could be content to just spoon its lush, ink-black sauce over some white rice. Honey walnut shrimp might read terribly (fried shrimp bathed in mayo and tossed with honey-glazed walnuts), but this rendition of the Hong Kong classic is near perfect.
No meal can be considered complete here without a plate of either the roast duck (see the birds in a case up front, hanging from a hook) or the soy chicken, which is made irresistible with succulent meat and cracker-crisp skin.
Dessert is not a matter of “if there’s room at the end.” The sesame balls are larger than the norm, fried to a perfect golden brown, and taste so intensely of the seeds that flavor them that you might wonder whether they’d been spiked with liqueur. Even better are the egg custards, in which a buttery crust that flakes at the touch somehow contains—and preserves—a rich, almost runny center that jiggles like Jell-O.
I haven’t gotten to the bad news. It’s nothing to do with the food or the service, which is attentive, swift and, occasionally, personable. It’s the parking lot, which is a small-scale version of every suburban shopping mall the week before Christmas. Plan to park a few blocks away and walk. Annoying? Yes. But be glad for all that awaits you.
Corner Bites316 N. Washington St., Rockville, 240-268-1497, gocornerbites.com
This appears in the May/June 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine