Last year, Steven Wu was feeling pessimistic about the state of dim sum in the DC area. The Guangzhou native, who ran a pan-Asian restaurant in Annapolis, was well acquainted with the local Cantonese seafood palaces and teahouses serving the food of his childhood—and he felt they were declining in both quality and ranks.
“Dim sum was going to be disappearing soon,” Wu says. “The young generation doesn’t want to work in the kitchen, and the chefs are retiring. Right now, a lot of restaurants are ordering frozen dim sum from New York and California, so I’m afraid that the rest of my life, people would be eating, like, 60 or 70 percent frozen dim sum.”
Wu decided to do his part to reverse that. He hired Hong Kong–born chef Zhou “Joe” Zhuohuan and last August opened Corner Bites in the same downtown Rockville space that once housed Bob’s Noodle 66…