Very few restaurants in New York City have the distinction of being so easy to find that they don’t even need a street address. These are the restaurants that you can locate just by wandering towards them, following the skyline. But all of that being said, you have to know what you’re looking for when you do this– not every big building or monument in this city contains a restaurant, and not all that do contain one that’s worth visiting. But deep in the heavy concrete anchoring structure of the Manhattan Bridge sits one that is.

88 Palace (formerly 888 Palace, supposedly to make the name match the superfluous address) is on the top floor of the East Broadway Mall, nestled into an urban space that looks from one entrance like a train station, and on the other like a service entrance to an office building. You’d really never know there was dim sum inside if you didn’t go in and wander up the escalator, past the barrels of ginseng, past the phone card vendors, and past the kiosks selling ‘Hello Kittly’ bootleg knapsacks. As unlikely a location for a secret restaurant as this is, it somehow all seems contextually appropriate, as if the faux crystal chandelier and gold-mirrored paneling belong here, surrounded by the pilings of one of the city’s busiest bridges.

The ladies pushing the steam-trollies at the top of the stairwell were a welcome sight– far too many Chinese restaurants have moved away from the traditional dim sum cart to the a la carte. It’s so much less fun to order dim sum off of a menu than to point and gesture to get what you want (or in the case of the surprise order of chicken feet that almost always finds its way to the table– what you didn’t want). Once we sat down, the barrage began with no grace period for us to get our bearings; this was dim sum for the initiated, and fortunately, both HungryMan and our guest TVGal were well-schooled and ready to go. So go we did, first choosing the shrimp and scallop shumai, the shrimp chow fun, and a healthy-looking plate of sauteed spinach with garlic and ginger. We slurped down the very soft chow fun noodles almost the instant they hit the table, and then went to work on the spinach, which was probably my favorite thing in this, the first act of the meal. TVGal liked the shumai the best, commenting that the sauce seemed mellower than the normal hot chili dipping sauce. I think it had been cut with sesame oil, but whatever it was, it was very good.

Act two began with the unexpected appearance of the chicken feet, but once we clarified that we hadn’t ordered them, we quickly managed to procure my very favorite dim sum dish: turnip cake. 88 Palace does a very straightforward version of this, and in my book, that’s an excellent thing. I’ve had versions of this dish that try too hard, but this turnip cake was exactly as it should have been– flecked with pork (which is easy for vegetarians to pick out, if they like), dense with the turnip purée, and crispy in places on the outside from being pan-fried briefly. We also grabbed some spinach and chicken gyoza-style dumplings, which TVGal proclaimed to be her favorite of the meal, and then snagged another green plate– this time of watercress and garlic, which was peppery and dotted with chili flakes. Outstanding and unusual.

It was at this point, during the intermission of the meal, when TVGal came out of the closet as a fried rice fanatic, followed quickly by HungryMan’s admission of a similar preference. So we did the only thing we could, and picked up a plate of the stuff. We also decided that we couldn’t take much more food, so we chose one more item– the red bean bao zi steamed buns– to finish the meal. These were cooled to room temperature and were just a little bit chewy on the outside– precisely the way I like them.

All in all, this was one of our better dim sum experiences in New York. Perhaps it was made even a little more special by being hidden inside a fallout shelter’s worth of concrete, but no matter. What we do know is that we’ll be back, and that even more importantly, we’ll never have to do a Google search for the restaurant’s address, just as long as we point ourselves in the direction of the bridge and start walking.

88 Palace, 88 East Broadway (under the Manhattan Bridge in the East Broadway Mall), 212-941-8886