Eat: Fine Dining Gets the Dim-Sum Treatment (Finally)

William Brinson for The New York Times; Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Theo Vamvounakis.

I first ate dim sum in 1968 at Nom Wah, on Doyers Street in New York's Chinatown. (The place is still there.) The appeal of the service style was immediate and tremendous — why couldn't every meal be an uninterrupted stream of small, exotic dishes brought to you on a gleaming (or at least functional) cart? I'm quite sure that I said, either on that visit or one of the frequent ones that followed, "Someone needs to do this with non-Chinese food."

Tasting menus and tapas bars came close, but nothing quite captured the spirit of the dim-sum cart. Until last year, when State Bird Provisions opened on Fillmore Street in San Francisco.

State Bird is the brainchild of a wife-and-husband team of native Californians, Nicole Krasinski and Stuart Brioza. After some years in the Midwest and a stint at Rubicon (the San Francisco fixture that closed in 2008), the couple took some time off ("We didn't think it would be three and a half years," Brioza said, "but that's the way it goes sometimes") and developed what, after more than a few hiccups, turned into a wildly popular and still evolving concept.

The carts — at least half the food arrives that way, with the other half ordered off a menu — are uncommon to say the least. Although the concept is familiar to everyone at this point, these are laden not with the mostly brown and steamed food common to dim-sum parlors but with gorgeous, far-out, inventively served creations like kimchi yuba (tofu skin) with smoked egg; sweetbread meatballs with fig jam and pickled vegetables; lobster-and-lentil salad; and, yes, dumplings (guinea hen, with broth).

For me, this is a dream come true, because I'm pretty much a true omnivore: I will eat anything, and I love surprises. When I'm in a restaurant with friends, I'm happy to never open the menu and let others order, and there's nothing I like more than a table filled with food I can't even identify.

And State Bird goes beyond the surprise, producing a wild variety of avant-garde food that you really want to eat. What's happening here is the continuing evolution of highly trained, fine-dining-type chefs strutting their stuff in a casual atmosphere.

I went back to State Bird repeatedly and delightedly and finally asked Krasinski and Brioza if I could cook with them. It turned out that — this isn't shocking — many of their dishes were too complicated for me to deal with. But the ones we settled on, doable by anyone, are representative: highly flavored, unusual, delicious. For true authenticity, serve them on a cart.

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