Sun Garden Restaurant on 52nd Street has been feeding Kenosha’s Chinese-American community and a loyal cross-section of the city’s regulars for decades, and on a weekend morning, it runs closer to a neighborhood institution than a simple lunch spot.
You walk in around 11 a.m. on a Saturday and the dining room is already loud. Families are spread across round tables, a few solo diners are tucked near the windows with tea and a newspaper, and the carts — yes, actual rolling carts — are already making their rounds. That’s the thing about Sun Garden that separates it from every other Chinese restaurant in the county: they still do dim sum the old way, with servers pushing stainless steel trolleys through the room and lifting lids so you can point at what you want. No iPads. No checkboxes. Just eye contact and a nod.
The har gow skins are thin and slightly translucent, the shrimp inside plump and not overcooked. The siu mai come four to a steamer basket, each one tightly packed and finished with a dot of roe. Turnip cake arrives pan-fried to a proper crust on both sides, soft in the center. If you see the egg tarts go by, wave someone down — they sell fast and they deserve to. The custard is barely sweet, the shells flaky without being crumbly.
Dim sum at Sun Garden runs until around 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, and you should plan to get there before noon if you want full cart rotation. By 1:30 the selection thins out noticeably, and you’ll be choosing from whatever’s left rather than picking from the whole spread. Budget somewhere between $15 and $25 a person depending on how much restraint you can manage, which for most people is not a lot once the cart with the sticky rice in lotus leaf comes around.
The room itself is nothing special — standard banquet-hall setup, round tables with lazy Susans, the usual framed prints on the walls. That’s fine. You’re not here for the decor. You’re here because this style of service is genuinely rare outside of a handful of Chicago neighborhoods, and Sun Garden has kept it going in a mid-sized Wisconsin city through decades of food trends that had everyone chasing the next thing.
If you come on a weekday, they’re still open for lunch and dinner with a full menu of Cantonese standards — the roast duck plates are solid, the wonton soup is honest and hot, and the fried rice is the kind that’s been made thousands of times and shows it. But the dim sum weekend service is the reason to make a specific trip.
Sun Garden sits in a strip mall off 52nd, easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there, with parking that’s always a little tighter than you expect because the place fills up. Go anyway. Bring someone who likes to share. Let the carts come to you.
