Red Bowl

Great dim sum exerience. Everything was super good. There isn’t one dish I can think of that they didn’t have. We will be making it a regular Sunday event.

Red Bowl is an unexpected treat here in the Deep South, and it’s a great example of the growing Birmingham food scene. We went on Saturday morning for dim sum, and the restaurant was crowded. The shrimp bun, cucumber salad, and Beijing style pork chops were all delicious. Don’t expect anything overly spicy; the foundation of Red Bowl’s menu is the freshness of the ingredients.
After we finished eating we enjoyed a stroll through the Asian market that Red Bowl shares a building with. This was one of the most enjoyable meals that I have had in Birmingham. I can’t wait to return!

We were passing through town and it was suppertime, so we searched and found Red Bowl. So, SO glad we did! We ordered simple (road trip food!): the Hub had chicken lo mein and I had chicken mei fun. It was, no kidding, the best mei fun I’ve had in a long time. The chicken was remarkably tender, the veges were crispy-​perfect, and the sauce was delicately flavored. We topped off the meal with some taro mochi from the store, and are now considering selling our house to move to Birmingham…

This has always been one of my favorite places to eat with my boyfriend. It’s a hidden treasure of a restaurant. Everything is reasonably priced, the service is usually super fast, and the food is the most authentic meals ever.
All I should say is that you should be prepared for different service if going on a Sunday afternoon for the first time. The service process is very very different and can throw you off if you’re not used to it.

I have eaten at nearly every asian place in town, from Bamboo, to Asian cuisine (best bang for buck viet food), Red Pearl, Great Wall, Mr Lee’s chinese, and more.
This place is hands down the Best bang for buck korean food in town. The chive cakes are bomb as well as is the seafood pancake.
Their Bibimbap is excellent. Their korean soups (galbi tang, yookehjang) are awesome as well.
Their korean side dishes are available for purchase in the grocery area and are good as well. They have a korean cook in the back who makes it.
I am not the «pickiest» eater, and grew up poor, so when things are not «perfect» i dont diss the restaurant. There are too many needy and uppity people writing Unilocal reviews these days.
For example, I would give Gordo’s 5 stars because they have bomb a$$ tacos for a super good price. Take my review for what it’s worth.

My current favorite lunch is an order of steamed dumplings (8) followed by Hot spicy chicken and eggplant in a clay pot. An excellent lunch, which also fills the two of us up nicely.

DIM SUM!!! It was all so very good! This place will be in our regular restaurant rotation. The service was excellent too.

There is a Korean menu and a Chinese menu. On weekends, they have their dim sum menu and push carts around. It’s reminiscent of the much bigger Asian restaurants in California so don’t expect to have grade A quality dim sum. The tsu mai did not look good.
My friend and I were craving Korean so she ordered a tofu pot while I ordered the bulgogi. I have never had to cook my own bulgogi so you can imagine my confusion when the employees brought out a hot pot looking set up, raw meat, and prongs, and expected us to cook this ourselves.
The bulgogi was good but that may be because I haven’t had bulgogi in a couple months. Despite the giant plate we were supposed to cook it in, I somehow managed to eat the entire thing and had room for soda.
The tofu pot was not good. There were huge chunks of tofu and there was no flavor. There was some seafood but not much. I’m accustomed to tofu pots being filled that you can’t see through the contents. Unfortunately, this tofu pot rather looked more like tofu soup.
The banchan was average. The mushrooms were good. The kimchi tasted old and salty. They didn’t look very interesting.
Tea costs extra and they charge you an extra cup even if you don’t ask. It ended up being $ 2 even though my friend didn’t want tea.
The service is nice and they mean well. Most of them don’t understand any English. I asked for an empty bowl to put some of my food in and they kept bringing me bowls of rice. I would insist I didn’t want rice but just the bowl, they continued to bring more rice.

I’ll be sticking to Red Pearl for groceries and food.
Recently I stopped by and purchased several of the traditional sides that are served in the restaurant: seaweed salad, kimchee, spicy radish, fish cakes, etc. Everything seemed fresh and I was especially excited to get my hands on the seaweed salad. At the register, the cashier told my ard didn’t go through so I swiped it again. My card transactions come to my phone and it beeped twice. I was charged $ 44.39 two times. I showed this to the cashier but he refused to refund a charge. This was ¹⁰⁄₁₄. I called my bank and was told that they could do the paperwork but it would be faster if the business reversed or refunded on their end. On ¹⁰⁄₁₅ a manager responded to my note and said she would investigate. She promised that it would be cleared up in 2 — 3 days. Well, today is ¹⁰⁄₂₁ and nothing has changed. No calls, no explanation, just a brazen attempt to make $ 44.39 for doing absolutely nothing. When businesses mistreat their customers in the front of the «house» it makes me wonder what’s going on in the back.
1 star for the seaweed salad.

The dim sum was absolutely amazing. I’ve been looking for somewhere like this in Birmingham for a while. I can’t wait to go back!

I have been trying not to come here for a while and finally made it. On Saturdays and Sundays they serve dim sum from 10:30−2pm. It was just me so I made a pig of myself, but it was worth it. I got the taro bubble tea, vary good and sweet. Then they started coming around with carts. I am bad at remembering what all I got, so I’ll try my best. I started with fried eggplant, shrimp dumpling, and pork bun. One bun had a fig like center, and I had a banana leaf wrapped rice with mushrooms thing. If you like shrimp toast, they have something like that but not really greasy. Favorite thing to eat was the chicken feet. I ate till I could eat no more. There was so much more I wanted but I know my limits. I highly recommend this place. It’s clean, with friendly staff. Their English is broken but that’s fine by me. I am going back as soon as possible. I haven’t had food this traditional since China town in San Fran.

Authentic Korean-​Asian cooking. If this is new to you, then it’s a great place to be adventurous. Home made turnip and celery salads, pork steam dumplings to savory chicken feet. They have plenty of options if you want to play it safe, but some of the best dishes come with a little risk-​taking. Green onion pie is not what it sounds like and it’s better than you think (more like savory phyllo pastry).
Weekend lunches they push the dim sum cart around so you can see before you choose. In the evenings, you can order off the dim sum menu. Weekdays menu is just as good. Try the duck noodle bowl. Home made goodness.

First time here. Unfortunately the Dimsum isn’t served during the week only the weekends.
They only have 2 servers and service is pretty slow for lunch. I ordered chicken low mien from the lunch menu which plainly states that when you order off the lunch menu you get a choice of 3 sides. I was told you can only have 2 sides. Way too much food — mediocre food and priced pretty cheaply.

Dim Sum is offered on Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30 — 3:00!
Red Bowl offers the traditional dim sum items, and we tried most of them. We had the Siu Mai, Haw Gow, Sticky Rice wrapped in Tea Leaves, Bean Curd and Pork Dumplings, Fried Green Onion Pancakes, Steamed Bun, and Sesame Balls. We also tried the Jelly Fish Salad, Chinese Broccoli with Oyster Sauce, and Clams n Black Bean sauce. The last three were considered «special» dishes.
I thought most of the items were pretty average, but there were a couple that stood out. My favorites were the Bean Curd and Pork Dumplings, Chinese Broccoli, and the Clams.
«Meh, I’ve experienced better,» but I am happy to have a dim sum option in Birmingham.

I’m going with 5 stars because not only is the Dimsum tasty, the service is wonderful. No one wants to go to Dimsum and have to sit around and wait between food deliveries.
My family and I come for the Dimsum on Saturdays. We try to arrive between 10:30 and 11 because we have heard it can get busy. We have never waited and the place has never been full when we leave.
My girls enjoy this place also. They are 5 and 8. It took them a few times to determine what they liked, but now that they know they love this place. My oldest loves trying new dishes. I think she views the whole experience as a game.
Our favorite dishes are shrimp dumplings, red bean paste buns, pork vegetable roll up thingy (sorry I have no idea what it’s called but it is so good), and the eggplant. But everything we’ve tried is good. The bubble teas are pretty good also.
We have never ordered off the menu, but we have seen others do so and what they get looks tasty. We would definitely give it a try.
Yummy food, great friendly service, clean and reasonably priced for the quality and quantity.

I come here at least once a month, the food is reasonable like prices and the quality is really good, you can tell the Chef isn’t a amateur! The food is always freshly prepared and you can taste the quality of the fresh ingredients. They have Dim Sum (the only place in Birmingham for Dim Sum), Americanized Chinese food, and of course Authentic Chinese food. The Authentic is pretty, just Mom’s cooking at home!!! Definitely one of better Chinese restaurant in Birmingham!!! Also they serve Korean food too…

The dim sum here is just awful…

First and foremost: the dim sum is only available weekends and only available on Sunday’s until 3pm.
Upon learning that after arrival, this review does not include dim sum tastings. However, I don’t know if I’ll even risk returning to try it. I was very disappointed in almost every dish. The steamed dumplings were quite good but the sauce was overbearingly salty. The shrimp spring roll sat in a pile of grease when it arrived so needless to say, the grease was very unwelcome, and the roll only contained 2 small shrimps. The lamb & cabbage rice noodles were still bubbling so I had to wait a good 20mins before even being able to try it. Normally I wouldn’t complain about hot food being served hot but this seemed excessive. Not to mention, it was fairly flavorless and nondescript with fatty pieces of lamb meat. I actually have no complaints for the ginger shrimp but it wasn’t anything I’d make a trip for again.
The service was very attentive and friendly and the seating was comfortable.
I’m glad that the restaurant is attached to a pretty good Asian market, otherwise I would have called the outing a bust.

I think that Unilocal should have archived the older reviews and closed out the restaurant and started a new profile for this business/​reviews as the owners do not appear to be the same, although they could share one.
Anyway, this is a totally different restaurant since it was named Korean Barbecue or something like that. While the menu has expanded to include Chinese as well as the historical Korean fare, the focus appears to be more on Chinese, both Americanized and more in the stratosphere of Red Pearl and the new and improved Great Wall.
I stopped in for lunch last Friday and ordered the squid bibimbap which was a huge hot pot filled with plenty of squid, rice, vegetables, etc. plus an array of banchan for enhancing the dish. The food was good even if the squid was likely straight from the freezer. This is when I noticed they also have more traditional Chinese dishes including whole fried fish options, Xiao Long Bao, and … they serve dim sum on weekends from 10:30 to 3:30. Hot damn!
So we returned on Sunday at 11:30 to try the dim sum offerings. A pic of the menu is attached but on Sunday they had a few more dishes written on the menu as well. They do have cart service, but only two carts, one with the steamed dishes and another with the buns, scallion pancakes, chicken wings, etc. (which were lukewarm at best). This was a drawback as while not crowded, we were apparently the last table to get the cart so it had been picked mostly clean multiple times. Perhaps it would be best if you don’t speak Cantonese to order directly from the menu to tell the wait staff what you would like. Anyway, in order of preference, we had the following dishes:
1) braised sparerib with sauce. These actually seemed more fried than braised but they were our favorites. They seemed to be more like the cut of boneless spareribs as you may find on a typical Chinese menu but much better prepared. Ordered off of the dim sum menu.
2) XLBs — thick skin but good amount of soup and seemingly house made. The waitress Friday had stated as such. Ordered off the main menu.
3) thai style chicken (wings). These were excellent but only 3 to the order and only lukewarm by the time the cart came around.
4) a fried eggplant with bean sauce. If this had been hot out of the fryer, it would have been a tie for #2 but it was cold from the cart.
5) A vegetable bun/​dumpling from the cart which was still hot and amazing. Our one year old loved this. Spinach and mushrooms.
6) Shanghai spring roll. Ehh.
7) coldish mushroom and something shu mai.
We must have had two more forgettable dishes plus drinks and our total came out to about $ 48 for 2 adults and a baby. Dim sum is best with a group so everyone tries lots of dishes and gets a bit or two then orders more of the favorites. Still, it’s nice to have in town and we will be back.
Service was typical but there was definitely a language barrier asking about some of the items on the cart. Eventually, we just asked them to point them out on the menu if we did not recognize them.

The restaurant is now going by Red Bowl according to their new sign, so I’m guessing the renovations mentioned in another review are complete. And, wow! Basically this is a restaurant attached to an asian supermarket. The staff is super friendly and of course, very knowledgeable about the food they serve (and will tell you about it if you ask!)
I ordered steamed dumplings and a noodle bowl with chili sauce. The chili sauce reminded me of the consistency of American chili, but with ground pork, red and green onion, and some other delicious stuff that I couldn’t quite make out. It had a nice little heat to it, nothing too overwhelming, but perfect for a cold day. Very large portion, too! Enough for two meals, even without also ordering an appetizer. The steamed dumplings are all handmade, as the waitress informed me, and come with a soy-​chili dipping sauce and some fresh seaweed and asian slaw. As a final touch, when they bring your check you get a delicious little hard candy! As an extra bonus they offer long plastic chopsticks, which personally I find easier to hold.
The rest of their menu carries the standard Chinese restaurant fare, but they also offer Korean BBQ-​type dishes (which coincides with their pre-​renovation menu I suppose). Really excited about this place! Definitely coming back to sample more of the noodle bowls. If you are a fan of Red Pearl you definitely ought to hit this place up.