Nestled on Doyers Street in Chinatown, Nom Wah Tea Parlor has been serving baked goods and small plates of Cantonese delicacies since 1920, making it the oldest dim sum shop in New York City, if not the country. In recent years, after Wilson Tang took over the restaurant from his uncle Wally, Nom Wah has become the standard of excellence for dumplings and dim sum in the five boroughs, opening a counter service spin-off in Nolita this fall, as well as a second full-service location in Philadelphia.

As Nom Wah’s name continues to ring out in NYC, the restaurant tends to attract its fair share of novices—people who have never held a pair of chopsticks before, let alone tasted some of the more exotic items on the store’s menu. Now, in a new episode of Zagat’s “Stop Doing It Wrong,” Tang gives a few newbies the lowdown on how to eat dim sum without completely embarrassing themselves.

Tang says: "If there's someone at the table who has better chopstick skills, like myself, I can kind of hand it off to someone...It's typically three fingers. The second one is the anchor, between your thumb and your forefinger. Then basically with your three fingers, like how you would hold a pen, you're controlling the top. In a lot of the more traditional banquet-style places, they have [something] in Chinese call gong kuai, which means public chopsticks. You don't want to get his cooties." 

Tang says: "We get our fair share of newbies. They don't know how to order. They either order too little or too much....I like using the word tapas when we're talking about dim sum, because they're all small plates. When I'm having dim sum with my friends and family I like to get a series of the classics: shrimp dumplings, our pork dumplings, our shrimp and snow pea leaf dumplings."

Tang says: "What I usually do is just kind of bite the finger [of the chicken feet] and suck on it. [Spitting it out] does seem gross, but that's just normal, because you've gotta get rid of the bones."

Tang says: "There are some finger foods, like that [pork bun] I would totally just get in there with your hands and rip that apart." 

Tang says: "You grab another bite, have some more tea—it aides in digestion— and keep going until you're full. That's a great meal."