By ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, the parking lot at Asian Garden on Post Road is already filling up. Families arrive in clusters — grandparents moving slowly toward the entrance, kids running ahead, a few teenagers on their phones who snap to attention once the carts start rolling. Inside, the room is loud in the best possible way: the clatter of bamboo steamers, the squeak of cart wheels on tile, a half-dozen conversations layered over one another in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English.
Asian Garden has been operating on Warwick’s main commercial corridor for years, and it’s the kind of place that locals either know intimately or somehow haven’t stumbled onto yet. The dining room is large and functional, nothing precious about it — round tables fitted with lazy Susans, fluorescent lighting, walls hung with the standard landscape prints. None of that matters once the food starts arriving.
Dim sum service runs on weekend mornings, roughly from 10 a.m. through early afternoon, and it’s a proper cart-style operation. That’s worth noting because most dim sum in Rhode Island has migrated to an order-sheet format, which is efficient but strips out the spontaneity. Here, carts make their rounds and diners flag down what looks good. Har gow — the shrimp dumplings — are the first test of any dim sum kitchen, and Asian Garden’s hold up: thin wrappers, generous filling, properly steamed so they pull apart cleanly rather than tearing. The siu mai are dense and savory, pork and shrimp packed into open-top cups of dough. Cheung fun, the silky rice noodle rolls, arrive glistening with soy sauce, sometimes stuffed with shrimp, sometimes beef.
The turnip cake — lo bak go — comes pan-fried to a crisp exterior with a soft, faintly savory interior that’s easy to underestimate and hard to stop eating. Sticky rice in lotus leaf is another standard done right: the rice fragrant and just glutinous enough, the filling of pork and mushroom distributed throughout rather than clumped in the center. For the table willing to flag down the right cart, there are also egg tarts with short-pastry shells, sesame balls fried golden and filled with lotus paste, and a rotating selection of vegetable and tofu preparations for anyone steering away from meat.
Weekend dim sum for two runs somewhere between $25 and $40 depending on appetite and willpower, which is reasonable for the volume of food that accumulates. The bill tends to arrive as a slightly bewildering stack of small paper tickets, each representing a plate that landed on the table — a system that feels charmingly analog in 2024.
The dinner menu is a separate conversation, covering Cantonese-leaning Chinese dishes that regulars cycle through — whole fish preparations, clay pot dishes, a roast duck that gets ordered at nearly every other table on a Friday night. But the weekend morning ritual is the heart of the place.
Warwick’s Post Road stretch is not particularly scenic, and Asian Garden is not trying to be anything other than what it is: a working dim sum house that feeds a lot of people well, week after week. The carts keep moving, the tea keeps coming, and by 11:30 every table is full.
