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Dim sum traditionally comes in multiples of 3 or 4 in each steamer basket. However, there doesn't seem to be any resource to let the customer know whether you are getting 3 or 4 dumplings/items.

Is there a hard and fast traditional rule for each type of dim sum? Do har gow 蝦餃 and shu mai 燒賣 always come in 4s or do some restaurants serve them in 3s? What about wu gok 芋頭角 or char siu bao 叉燒包 - do they come in 2s or 3s or sometimes even 4s?

Factually, when dining at a dim sum restaurant, how do people know how many they will get? Is it always the same amount (a sort of tacit knowledge that regular customers pick up from experience) or, factually, can it differ between restaurants?

Turkeyphant
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I have eaten dim sum in many places and there is no hard and fast rule to it, it varies from restaurant to restaurant even in the same location.

In general the smaller the individual item is the more there is on a plate, Har Kau are small so you get 4, dumplings, paper prawns and other larger items take more space so you usually get 3. Bigger is more expensive, so having fewer means the plates will be similar in price as well as the general amount of food.

GdD
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The information previously provided by helpful users in the comments has allowed me to answer this question.

It turns out that factually there is no hard-and-fast rule about the number of items in each order. This can vary between different dim sum cultures in different parts of the world and even between different restaurants at opposite ends of the same city's Chinatown.

In general, you can assume that smaller items like har gow 蝦餃 will come with more per order compared to larger items such as char siu bao 叉燒包 but there is no more tacit knowledge than this at play.

To be certain of how many of each item you will receive per order, the only way to be sure is to check with the restaurant staff beforehand.

Turkeyphant
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    I deleted the lengthy discussion, since it was going nowhere. A note about the "self-answer" feature on SE sites: It is meant for either cases where the OP knew the answer before asking the question, with the intention to make interesting non-trivial knowledge public, or cases where the OP solved the problem with information from other sources, and wants to provide this information to other users. It is not intended for repeating information that is already posted on the question page already, especially when it starts competing with other answers. – rumtscho Mar 10 '23 at 09:40
  • @rumtscho where have all the comments from the original question gone? They provided the most useful information on this page. – Turkeyphant Mar 11 '23 at 10:11
  • The comments with timestamps are also essential to showing where gdd copied previous content from me verbatim. – Turkeyphant Mar 11 '23 at 10:16
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    I also deleted the question comments, mostly to contain the drama. Most of the comments were an answer to the question, which is against our rules. Comments and posts on SE get soft-deleted, with moderators, high-rep users and staff having access to them, so should controversy flare up again, it will be possible to reconstruct the time sequence of events. – rumtscho Mar 11 '23 at 11:58
  • @rumtscho thanks for clarifying. I didn't know the rule about competing answers before and will avoid this in the future. Can the question now be reopened or not? – Turkeyphant Mar 11 '23 at 14:26
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    The question was closed by the community, not by a moderator. You would have to convince the community members that you have improved it into a form that is not closable, then they can vote for reopening. – rumtscho Mar 11 '23 at 20:19
  • @rumtscho Thanks. I'm not sure I understand the reasoning of closing it. There may well be problems with the question and some may think I may have shown poor etiquette in answering but it's factually false to suggest it's opinion-based. – Turkeyphant Mar 12 '23 at 21:51