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. After visiting during Palette’s December 2025 soft opening at The Market Place in Tustin, our experience fell so far below the “good, not great” threshold recently set by rival upscale dim sum restaurant Qua that we didn’t know whether we would return again, an outcome we would never have predicted after dining at San Francisco’s Palette earlier that year. When we tried again six months later, it wasn’t much better; the menu was larger and the dishes were more colorful.

Admittedly, Palette’s luxurious Ghirardelli Square location set a high bar, as it compares favorably 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. With a similar vibe but larger footprint than the typical Lunasia, San Francisco’s 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.

What drew us to Palette’s SF menu were unique items such as pan-seared black pepper beef soft buns, green garlic dumplings with deluxe 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 matches the luxe ingredients: As just one example, lobster ha gow dumplings arrive with a butter-filled pipette that you can inject into each dumpling for added flavor, a cute touch that thankfully made its way southward to Orange County.

Tustin’s 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 on the left side include two extra-large video screens (originally featuring nature, waterfront, and urban scenes from China, later Palette promotional videos), as well as a large, glass-windowed kitchen at the back of the dining room. The smaller dining space includes an oversized bar and overlooks the parking lot.

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 generally well-intentioned servers. On our first 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. Six months later at dinnertime, there were fewer and somewhat better trained staff, but still multiple service omissions and errors – notably paired with suggested tip calculations reaching up to 25%.

In an effort to start our first visit 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.

During the soft opening, 22 dishes were available at prices ranging from $7 to $42, and we sampled half of them. As savory courses, we ordered classic xiao long bao pork soup dumplings ($7/3), lobster ha gow ($12/3), crispy typhoon XO shrimp dumplings ($8/5), chili sandstorm wings ($18/8), Sichuan green beans ($18), wagyu and roasted garlic ($36), and truffle scallop garlic noodles ($42). Lightly but nicely spiced and perfectly crisped wings were the highlight, with entirely adequate fried green beans thankfully providing early sustenance during an extended wait for other dishes. Sadly, none of those items reached “great” levels, and some fell short of good: Wagyu beef was tender but lukewarm, the small garlic noodle portion combined Olive Garden-quality with only three (fairly large) scallops, and the crispy shrimp dumplings were overwhelmingly wrapper-heavy and flat in flavor. Palette’s xiao long bao were scaldingly hot and bland inside, while the lobster ha gow were overwhelmed by their pipette butter. We’ve had better dim sum and Chinese dishes at literally all of the local places mentioned above, typically at half or two-third Palette’s prices.