Jun Bo

7717 Nicollet Ave.
Richfield, MN
(612) 866-6888

Category: Chinese, Dim Sum

Rating (Scale 1-10, with 10 being the highest):
Food: 8
Service: 6
Ambience: 6

Recommendation: Very Good! Great place for Dim Sum, especially for a weekend brunch. Offers a large variety of dishes.

Despite its location on I-494 and Nicollet, entering Jun Bo makes you feel like you’re in Chinatown in NYC. Welcomed by a fish tank and hostesses in red silk dresses, you enter into a large space that can hold 400+ people filled with family style tables, wood paneling, red carpet, and red chairs. Carts of delicious food being wheeled around the tables..wooden tins filled with steamy dumplings, spongy white buns, sautéed vegetables, deep fried this and that. While Jun Bo has a large menu of Chinese dishes as well as a menu for Dim Sum, we took the easy way out and went with a Taiwanese friend, who picked out all the 15+ dishes we tried. All the dishes were great and we didn’t leave disappointed.

You can’t go to a Dim Sum place and not have dumplings, so we tried a few different ones. Traditional dumplings such as the Shrimp and Cilantro wrapped in translucent rice flour skin were great, especially when dipped in the accompanying soy sauce and red chili paste. You can’t go wrong with dumplings at this place…the Pork was also great and so was the Chive, Pork, and Shrimp. Although the Shrimp and Scallops was decent, the Scallops didn’t do much to the dish so we’d stick to the ones with just Shrimp. One of the Pork dumplings came with a red vinegar sauce which we didn’t care for. We stuck to the soy sauce.

Next came a round of buns..a whole bunch of them! We tried a few different types of Pork buns. Fluffy and white on the outside, they were filled with Pork, as well as BBQ Pork. We preferred the BBQ Pork over the plain Pork. After the Pork buns, we moved on to the dessert buns. We really liked the Steamed Bun with the Egg Custard Filling. The filling was yellow, which provided a good contrast to the fluffy white bun and tasted a bit like egg yolks, but in a good dessert sort of way. The Pineapple bun (no pineapples involved in the recipe), which is really a sweet pastry was also delicious. The top of the bun (resembles a pineapple with a yellowish criss-cross pattern) is crunchy and is quite sweet compared to the bread underneath. The bread is soft and sweet.

Other dishes we tried bordered on the “Bizarre Foods for Beginners” side. Chicken Feet, which were soft and chewy, came lathered in a sweet sauce (a pain to eat with all the tiny bones!), Tripe (Cow’s stomach), which came in a delicious sauce, and Cold Seaweed…which tasted like the Sea!

The Turnip cake which was pan-fried with a bland sort of taste provided a good variety in the midst of all the dumplings and buns. Also great was the Deep Fried Tofu with Shrimp Paste. The Sticky Rice Ball with Pork was also good but if you're trying one Pork dish, stick to the dumplings. Beef Short Ribs, although greasy were excellent. The only dish we didn’t quite care for was the Chinese Broccoli, which had a very greasy taste and texture and was slightly bitter.

Most servers speak some English so its not hard to figure out what you are getting. Although they serve Dim Sum all day long (you can order from their Dim Sum menu when the carts stop going around), we’d recommend going there for weekend brunch to get the most of the experience. Plenty of parking in their lot.

$$. We don’t exactly know how many dishes we ordered but total per person with tax and tip was $16. None of us left hungry!