Palette Dim Sum

“Disappointing” is a dangerously loaded concept when discussing restaurants: Though it’s typically used to sum up a bad experience, even something good can be fairly described as disappointing if it falls short of advance expectations. Unfortunately, after a year of genuine excitement over the impending opening of Palette Dim Sum – Orange County’s version of the high-end Bay Area Chinese restaurant Palette Tea House – disappointing is the only word that captures our feelings. Having visited during Palette’s December 2025 soft opening at the Tustin Market Place, our experience fell so far below the “good, not great” threshold recently set by rival upscale dim sum restaurant Qua that we don’t know whether we’ll return again, an outcome we would never have predicted after dining at the San Francisco Palette in January.

The Ghirardelli Square location of Palette is upscale by comparison with Orange County dim sum restaurants such as Westminster’s Seafood Cove 2 and Seafood Paradise, Irvine’s China Garden, and variously located Capital Noodle Bars: There are no dim sum carts, and every part of the experience feels luxurious rather than commodified. With a larger footprint than the typical Lunasia, Palette fills its organic, lush dining room with namesake-inspired sharing dishes, hexagonal wooden dim sum steamers, and even elaborately decorated tables; one long table even features its own central river and waterfall.

Moreover, the original Palette menu includes unique items such as pan-seared black pepper beef soft buns, green garlic dumplings with Spanish iberico pork and kim chi, taro puffs in the shape and color of black swans, sea bass and caviar dumpings, abalone siu mai, and black squid dumplings. Plating is great, too: as just one example, lobster ha gow dumplings arrive with a butter-filled pipette that you can inject into each dumpling for added flavor.

The Tustin version of Palette is substantially different. It begins with a fairly large space – extensively remodeled from the former Chinese/Japanese “Asian bistro” Wokcano – with front doors that open to reveal a hosts’ counter between left (larger) and right (smaller) dining rooms. Regrettably, the plant and water elements of the Ghirardelli dining room have disappeared here in favor of slate tiles and jail bar-like metal tubes, though plush seats and benches somewhat soften the boxy, modern design. Visual highlights include two extra-large video screens featuring nature, waterfront, and urban scenes from China, as well as a large, glass-windowed kitchen at the back of the left dining room.

Somewhere over 100 guests can dine at once across numerous rectangular and circular tables, using paper menu cards and pens to order from nicely dressed and well-intentioned servers. On our visit, there was no apparent shortage of front-of-house staffing, though a distinct lack of proper advance coordination was evident from moment one through the point when our (two-hour) lunch ordeal mercifully came to an end.

To start on a high note, we chose one cocktail from a list of six options ($16 to $18): Sticky Situation ($18) was a rum and mango juice drink perfectly topped with a coconut milk/sesame/toasted rice froth, seemingly inspired by the classic Asian dessert mango sticky rice. This was both the first thing we received and the most impressive single item of the entire dining experience. In addition to glasses of tap water, slightly north of lukewarm Jasmine green tea was offered at no charge, and barely heated on a tea candle base. You’ll note at this point that the word “lukewarm” repeats in the following paragraphs, and yes, that’s intentional.