Do you assume that for real dim sum — the kind with the carts, the har gow, the turnip cake — you have to drive forty-five minutes south on 35 to a strip mall in Carrollton? Most people do. It’s a reasonable assumption. But you can skip the drive.
Kirin Court on South Loop 288 has been quietly running weekend dim sum service long enough that the regulars treat it like a neighborhood institution, which, for a city Denton’s size, is kind of remarkable. It’s not a secret. The parking lot on Sunday morning tells you everything — full by 10:30 a.m., families filing through the front door with grandparents in tow, a wait list scrawled on a notepad at the host stand.
The room is large, louder than you expect, and brighter than most Denton restaurants ever allow themselves to be. Round tables with lazy Susans seat groups of six or eight comfortably, and the whole setup signals that this is a place built for sharing, not for a solo lunch scroll on your phone. Carts still circulate on weekends — not every dim sum restaurant has kept that tradition — and there’s a low-grade, wonderful chaos to it. A cart comes by with siu mai before you’ve even ordered tea. You wave it down. That’s how it starts.
What to get: the har gow here are firm-skinned and generously filled, not the tissue-thin wrappers with a single shrimp that pass for dim sum at lesser spots. The turnip cake — lo bak go — comes out pan-fried with a clean, slightly crispy edge. Order the sticky rice in lotus leaf if you see it; it disappears fast. The XO sauce on the cheung fun (rice noodle rolls) is sharper than mild, which is the right call. If you’re going with four or more people, your bill will probably land somewhere between $15 and $20 a person before tip, which for this quality and quantity is genuinely reasonable.
Weekday lunch runs off a menu rather than carts, which is fine but not quite the same experience. If you’re going for the first time, aim for Saturday or Sunday between 10 a.m. and noon. Come earlier than you think you need to. The wait on a late Sunday morning can stretch to thirty or forty minutes, and they don’t take reservations for dim sum service, so showing up at 11:45 feeling clever is a mistake you only make once.
The dinner menu covers Cantonese standards — whole fish, clay pot dishes, roast duck — and it’s worth returning for, though the room feels different at night, less electric somehow. The dim sum energy is what defines this place.
Denton’s food scene has expanded considerably in the last few years, and most of the coverage goes to the breweries and the burger spots and the new coffee roasters, which is fair. But this city has been home to a full-scale, cart-service dim sum restaurant for years, and it never quite gets the mention it deserves. If you’ve been putting off the trip to Carrollton, stop putting it off — just drive to Loop 288 instead.
