Yum Cha Dinner at Prince Palace Hotel: The Sesame Ball Trick

The ginger soup at yum cha put us off on the first spoonful, and we nearly left the sesame balls alone for the rest of the meal.

This is the one dish from our Prince Palace Hotel yum cha dinner that needed an instruction manual. Once we had it, the rest of the table made sense too.

Why does the ginger soup taste wrong on its own?

We tasted the soup by itself first, the way you would taste any broth before eating what is in it. It was sharp, almost medicinal, and none of us wanted a second spoonful. The balls sitting in it looked like the sesame dumplings we knew from home, so we assumed the soup was just a serving liquid, something to ignore. That assumption is the mistake. The soup on its own is not meant to be drunk plain. It is a strong ginger tea, closer to a spiced tonic than a dessert broth, and it only works once something sweet is moving through it.

What is the actual trick?

Bite the ball first. A little of the ground sesame filling runs out into the spoon or the bowl. Work that filling into the ginger soup before you drink it. The sesame turns the sharp ginger into something rounder and sweeter, and the ginger cuts the heaviness of the sesame paste. Neither part is much good alone. Together, we went from pushing the bowl aside to going back for more.

We tried the soup on its own first and went “ugh.” Then we learned it: bite the ball, let a little sesame out, work it into the ginger soup.

What are these sesame balls actually made of?

The dumpling itself is a soft, chewy ball made from glutinous rice flour, packed with a paste of ground black sesame and sugar. In Chinese cooking this dessert is called tang yuan. The Thai kitchens that serve it have kept the Chinese name in spirit but call it bua loy nam khing, and they lean harder on the ginger side of the soup than most Chinese versions do. That is the quirk we kept running into all through the meal: dishes that started as Chinese classics, then got pulled toward Thai flavour, sweeter here, sharper there, until they were something in between.

What else was on the yum cha table

Alongside the sesame balls, a fried bun with custard inside was the dish that stuck with us most. It came out hot, crisp on the outside, and the custard inside was looser and sweeter than we expected from the crust. Lychee closed the meal out, plain and cold, a relief after everything else on the table had a strong scent to it. Yum cha here was all-you-can-eat, so there was no pressure to finish a dish we didn’t like on the first try, which is exactly how we ended up going back for the sesame balls a second time.

Is this worth the detour with kids or on a short stay?

Our kids treated the soup as a game once we explained the trick, arguing over how much filling to let out before drinking. That made it an easy dish to hand to children who are usually picky about strong flavours, because they controlled how sweet or sharp each spoonful turned out. If your children refuse to try new food without being talked into it, this is a dish where a two-sentence explanation does the talking for you. If you are only in Bangkok for a night before heading north, it is a manageable, sit-down way to spend an evening without needing a car or extra planning.

We still don’t know why the ginger soup only works once you have learned to eat it, and we didn’t find an answer worth repeating here. What we know is that we finished the bowl. Anyone travelling through Bangkok with children who like a bit of food theatre at the table should try it. Anyone who dislikes strong ginger and has no patience for figuring out an unfamiliar dish mid-meal can skip it without missing much.