Note: This article inaugurates my weekly column on dining culture in the Bay Area. As someone who has lived here for a quarter century, consider it my love letter to the region, and like any great love, it is a complicated one, interrupted by melancholy, fury and the occasional eye roll. Operating a restaurant here has become a perilous task, and yet I marvel at how many cooks are still dedicated to producing food — at every price point — with the power to stop conversation. In a region where gentrification is changing every aspect of our lives, this column honors our cities that are being lost as well as those that are becoming. Most important, it is a celebration of the places and the people who make the food we eat every day. — J.K.

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The curry charcoal pineapple buns at Dragon Beaux in the Richmond District make for a dramatic Instagram photo, three goth-black buns with crackly yellow caps, resembling a particularly malevolent species of mushroom.

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They pale in “Like”-worthiness, though, to the dim sum restaurant’s “Five Guys” xiao long bao: a steamer of pink, green, yellow, black and white soup dumplings, the perfect circle to photograph for the perfect square.

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Dragon Beaux may be the first Cantonese restaurant in the Bay Area to add charcoal powder to its buns, but it’s not alone in tinting cheong fan (rice noodle rolls) stoplight red and dusting steamed mushroom buns with cocoa powder so the brown tops are shot through with white fissures, just like real shiitakes.

A new spirit of playfulness, or maybe a new aptitude for social-media crack, has infused dim sum of late. When did dumplings become so cute? Custard buns with pig faces — pink ears and snout, black-sesame eyes — have migrated from restaurant to restaurant. So have swans with feathery pastry bodies.

I have taken so many dumpling photos that I found myself wondering why this hadn’t happened sooner. Have we been forcing California dim sum chefs to imitate Hong Kong so faithfully that any innovation comes off as ersatz? Why shouldn’t dim sum chefs be free to go wild? Could the flavors of our taro cakes and shiu mai actually speak to the city around them?

Cell phone cameras, I’m beginning to believe, may be changing dim sum in the Bay Area — for the better.

Advances in dumpling aesthetics have not been limited to the major dim sum kitchens. As part of Eight Tables’ high-priced tasting menu, George Chen’s cooks spoon osetra caviar and uni into the upper folds of har gow. Dumpling Time fills bright-pink beet buns with taro puree and crafts a soup dumpling the size of a pomelo. At Chili House, chef Tong Gang Wang, a lifelong student of Beijing court cuisine, sculpts pastry chicks so lifelike I suspect more than one customer has adopted his dessert rather than bite its head off.

“Does it photograph well?” has become such a critical question for restaurant owners of all stripes — more than 11 million Instagram posts are tagged #eeeeeats — that it’s a wonder no one has yet come up with a unicorn swirly-rainbow egg custard tart.

The closest thing may be the ’gram-ready sampler at sister restaurants Hong Kong Lounge on Geary Boulevard and Lai Hong Lounge in Chinatown. You can get at least five Like-bait photos out of the large steamer: piggy buns, translucent rabbits, dumplings in purple, gold and green. They’re uniformly gummy. In fact, they’re some of the weakest dishes on the menu. But they do look good. (For the best pig-face buns around right now, visit Peony in Oakland.)

No restaurant has embraced the technicolor as enthusiastically as Dragon Beaux in the Outer Richmond, owned by the Ng brothers, who also own Koi Palace in Daly City. As the 3-year-old restaurant evolves, it keeps pushing dim sum in more varied directions, leading Los Angeles food writer David Chan to muse on his blog last month, “Does Dragon Beaux serve the best dim sum in the United States?”

Dragon Beaux’s loudest shot over the bow of tradition may be a deep-green soup dumpling made with spinach juice and kale. Kale!

Co-owner Willy Ng says that he came upon the idea of using kale in a dumpling at a juice bar a decade ago. The multicolored potatoes and cauliflower at Berkeley Bowl have inspired him. So have trips to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where theatricality can sometimes reach absurd levels.

Ng shows me a cell phone video of a sweet-and-sour fish he ate on his last trip to China: a whole fish, scored, battered and deep fried, is smothered in a 2-inch layer of cotton candy. A vinegary red sauce is poured onto the sweet batting at the table, where the spun sugar melts into it. (How did it taste? I ask him. Like sweet-and-sour, he replies with a smile and a shrug.)

Dennis Leung, a former pastry chef and the general manager at Dragon Beaux, freely acknowledges the importance of Instagram. He’s seen the restaurant group’s social-media impressions rise 500 percent in the past few years. “Some people say it’s a gimmick, and we should focus on the food, but advertising has always been there,” he says. “With these colorful items, it’s one way to help us boost that advertisement.”

Dragon Beaux’s green matcha pineapple buns and black-and-gold steamed custard roll, Ng adds, may be new but reflect traditional Chinese culinary theory, which prizes appearance as well as aroma and taste. “We make them colorful to stimulate the eyes,” he says, but always with red rice paste, turmeric or spinach, not food coloring.

“We’re a little slow here compared to Asia,” Leung adds. “The chefs here (in America) are more from the older generation, and not as willing to try new things.” Younger dumpling masters are content to stay in China, and while young American-born cooks are all for innovation, they don’t have the same technical proficiency. Koi Palace’s customers are older and more likely to speak Cantonese, and they’re finely attuned to the quality of classic dim sum items, while Dragon Beaux’s nontraditional items bring in more non-Chinese diners and more second- and third-generation Chinese Americans.

In all its experimentation, a few of Dragon Beaux’s most visually striking items can suffer the same fate as the Lai Hong Lounge sampler. Pitch-black squid ink dumplings stuffed with pork and peanuts, as well as the spinach-green dumpings crowned with a dollop of XO sauce, tend to go flaccid in the steamer. Mongolian beef bao, served with sizzling onions in a tiny skillet and drizzled with rice wine that spits and steams, are a cute conceit that provide more drama than payoff.

But when playful flavors bolster the spectacle of, say, the deep purple crackle-topped buns encasing Japanese yam puree, or fragile half-moon pastries with char siu and braised apple, the dish answers a call for novelty we may never have thought to listen for.

When you can taste the same steamed spareribs at 100 restaurants in the Bay Area, the rapidity with which photogenic dumplings migrate from one place to the next doesn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps it’s flat-out copying. After all, no one seems to have protected the piggy bao IP. But each time a flaky carrot-shaped turnip bun comes out of a new kitchen, and a diner posts a photo on Yelp for other diners to spot and chase down, it’s inducement for American dim sum chefs to come up with their own ideas.

That is what makes Dragon Beaux’s adventurousness so appealing: By being unafraid to experiment, they make us all reconsider our brunch.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com. Twitter/Instagram: @jonkauffman

Four things worth knowing

Address: Dragon Beaux, 5700 Geary Blvd., S.F., (415) 333-8899, www.dragonbeaux.com. Open for dim sum 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. (The evening menu is different.)

Will there be a wait? Yes, an hour or more on weekends. Best time to drop in is after 1 p.m. on weekdays.

Cost: Expect to pay $35 per person, more if you splurge on seafood and larger plates.

To taste the rainbow: Matcha (green) and yam (purple) pineapple buns; (red) rice crepe with fish; charcoal custard roll (gold and black); and the “Five Guys” soup dumplings (yellow, green, black, red and white).