So I finally got round to trying this upbeat fancy Yum Cha place. Raved on by the media, critics, and clueless sheepy friends, it’s suppose to be the supreme Yum Cha cuisine. At first look the place is bright, smick and clean, it has a much more welcoming feel than your dingy local Yum Cha restaurant.
Instead of your typical Yum Cha where they push a cart with lots of steam and fried goodies, you order from a paper table placemat with pictures. There’s a positive and a negative to this method. The positive is that you know exactly what you order. The negative is that you don’t know what these unheard of dumpling looking kind of things actually look or smell like. And I mean c’mon that’s half the fun of going to Yum Cha. I love it when they push the carts to the table and open all these bamboo lids and you get to say yay or nay. And even if you’re a regular they will open the lid on a totally regular day at Yum Cha and surprise you with something you’ve never seen before.
Tim Ho Wan charges a premium because they’re Tim Ho Wan, but it comes with the same lousy attitude and the same lousy fake almost smiles from their wait staff. The food takes forever to come out and they cram it all onto your tiny little tables. Oh and it’s $2.50 for tea per person! What kind of sick person would charge for tea at a Yum Cha restaurant? That’s the equivalent to the most hated guy in the world Mark Shkreli who increased the AIDS drug by like a 1000% percent! On top of this outrageous blasphemy they have also decided to take away the Sriracha chilli sauce. I almost walked out upon this discovery, but I had already ordered, here is where i will insert my sad face emoticon so you can all empathize with my pain 😦 Instead they have this fancy chilli salsa sauce, which is crap! You don’t use anything but Sriracha for your chilli sauce at Yum Cha! That’s rule of thumb, if you open Yum Cha you use Sriracha and free tea.
Okay so lets talk about the actual food. The pork buns are great. Perfectly deep fried, crispy thin outer bread and sweet pork filling. It was great, fantastic even, but everything else, CRAP!! The noodle wraps and filling are suppose to be so amazing it punches you in the mouth and makes you realise that what you thought was Yum Cha all these years was nothing more than reheated frozen food. But the sad truth is that the frozen Siu Mai (pork and prawn dumplings) that I buy from my local dim sum place, which I take home and throw in the steamer taste just as good as this supreme Yum Cha restaurant. While my dingy local Yum Cha restaurant may probably over charge me (since I don’t know how to read the Chinese paper slips they stamp on to tally up your orders), they have a much wider variety of goodies to choose from, they have the same lousy service, but they have Sriracha and free tea! And although I may have been over charged they still clock in cheaper than one overrated, overhyped Tim Ho Wan experience.
Ranter & Banter 