Dumpling Time was a San Francisco favorite before expanding to the East Bay.

East Ocean Seafood Restaurant offers classic dim sum dishes.

Dumpling Hours serves panfried, boiled, and steamed dumplings.

Dumpling Time was a San Francisco favorite before expanding to the East Bay.

It used to be that uncovering good dim sum required a little legwork: an exploratory mission to Oakland’s Chinatown or Dublin’s Ulferts Center, perhaps, or a longer journey to Milpitas Square or Clement Street across the bridge.

Those days are in the past, fortunately, as dim sum—and dumplings in particular—is more accessible than ever before in the greater East Bay.

At his popular East Ocean Seafood Restaurant in Alameda, for example, David Chan kept hearing that many regulars had moved to the Walnut Creek area. So he expanded east to the Ygnacio Plaza shopping center across from Heather Farm Park, where shoppers can now enjoy shrimp har gow in between trips to T.J. Maxx and Sports Basement.

Chan’s new East Ocean outpost has a casual, modern look—different from his 40-year-old Alameda restaurant’s more traditional Chinese banquet setting. It’s also one-fifth the size and, alas, lacks the space to accommodate the cuisine’s iconic rolling carts, pushed around by waiters shouting out what’s on offer. Still, the kitchen dishes out a robust menu of immaculately prepared Hong Kong–style dim sum, served seven days a week. In addition, it delivers that communal, comforting dining experience so familiar to lovers of dim sum, in which myriad little plates and steaming bamboo baskets—each filled with a unique, delicious bite—pile up on the table until no one can eat another morsel.

“This is the original tapas,” says Chan. “You see all these Spanish restaurants— well, this is the OG. We’ve been doing it for one thousand years.”

East Ocean Seafood Restaurant offers classic dim sum dishes.

While the decor reads more contemporary café, East Ocean’s dim sum remains refreshingly old-school, a throwback to the days of substance over style. Not that Chan wouldn’t like to serve barbecue buns shaped like panda bears and dumplings in exotic colors. It’s just that the kitchen is busy pumping out a broad swath of dishes, from panfried turnip cakes to fried taro meat dumplings.

What sets East Ocean apart are those classics. The turnip cake, for example, is cooked firm on the outside but with a luscious, velvety interior punctuated by small hits of salty pork. A personal favorite, the taro meat dumplings are a masterpiece of varying texture and flavor: bird’s nest–like fried ribbons of steamed-then-mashed sweet taro encase a savory, creamy center of seasoned pork, dried shrimp, and shiitake mushrooms. The steamed chicken feet reward the eater with tender, gelatinous meat bathed in a sweet-savory fermented bean sauce (just remember to spit out the bones). Sautéed pea sprouts provide a perfect spring-fresh complement to the bouncy shrimp in the steamed dumplings.

The kitchen also produces Cantonese-style rice noodle rolls, and on our visit, served a must-try special of spicy chili dumplings: moist pork wontons in an extrathin noodle skin doused with chili oil. eastoceanseafoodrestaurant.com​/WalnutCreek.

This hip newcomer boasts decidedly more flash—neon signage, multicolored dumplings, Wagyu beef—but remains grounded in the classics. As former director of operations Mike Haro says, while they strive to provide an elevated dim sum experience, “a lot of the recipes come from the owner’s mom.”

The San Francisco–born concept’s first East Bay location (another is slated for San Ramon later this year) nails the balancing act. First, it’s a beautiful restaurant with plenty of outdoor seating on Berkeley’s swanky Fourth Street that remains accessible to families—kids can watch dumplings being made by hand in the open kitchen. Most important, the food is very well executed, with the gourmet add-ons worth the splurge. Lobster siu mai retains a dense fish cake–like texture but adds luscious decadence courtesy of butter, white truffle oil, and (of course) lobster. The tom yum goong mimics xiao long bao, with the addition of coconut milk lending a delightful tropical sweetness to the soupy pork encased in paper-thin, magenta-hued beet skin—make sure to balance the richness of this dish with vinegar dipping sauce. Even standards like pork gyoza taste a cut above: Moist ground pork mixed with ginger and green onions comes wrapped in an impressively delicate skin and topped by a crispy layer of panfried cornstarch crust.

A couple of northern Chinese specialties also hit the mark. The Beijing noodles present toothsome house-made pasta with succulent ground pork perfectly punctuated with slightly pungent fermented soybean paste. The shrimp toast, meanwhile, is an addictive savory Chinese doughnut featuring a ribbon of pureed shrimp and dashes of spicy aioli. dumplingtime.com​/Berkeley.

Dumpling Hours serves panfried, boiled, and steamed dumplings.

Launched quietly last summer, this little eatery has caused oversize buzz in downtown Walnut Creek—and as of June, Brentwood—with its dumpling-centric menu. The big draw here (as the name would imply) is those dumplings, which come steamed, boiled, and panfried. In particular, the mouthwatering soup dumplings were, pound for pound, the best I tried. These heavenly pouches exhibit an ever-so-light skin that just manages to hold in what seems like an ocean of savory broth that hits the right sour note. Depending on your mood, you can get them stuffed with pork, chicken, beef, shrimp, or crab, plus variations that add extra spice or black truffle oil—the crab and pork were especially good. The restaurant earns extra points for the cute—and brilliantly designed—red dumpling spoons that help minimize broth spillage.

Also excellent are the pork buns, a spin (literally) on xiao long bao in which the kitchen flips thicker-skinned dumplings upside down to panfry the tops to brown crispiness. The non-fried bottoms are then served right side up with a concave ceiling lightly sprinkled with black sesame seeds—just make sure to notch a cooling vent in the air-tight dumpling skin before slurping down the molten-hot soupy porky goodness.

Non-dumpling items of note include kelp-like wood and silver ear mushroom salad, green onion pancakes, and braised beef noodle soup. dumplinghours.com.