Yummy cha?
A group of eight of us went to Yum Cha on Saturday at Regal, above SMK on Courtenay Place, because I had a massive craving for chive pancakes. Spoiler alert: we didn’t get any chive pancakes. In fact, the whole thing was kind of lame.
Although we were pretty near the door to the kitchen, we were at the end of the food service, so almost every plate that managed to make its way to us was cold. We waited long times between tea refills, and often servers totally skipped us, taking good-looking food back into the kitchen without bothering to offer it to us. My dining companions suggested it was because our table was empty of dishes that they thought we didn’t want anything else. Actually, our table was empty because we weren’t offered very much! For a table full of white people, the fried dumplings that we craved were in very short supply. We begged for roast pork when the table next to us snaffled the last plate (the server ignored our "OMG PLEASE COME HERE!" looks), but were told there was no more. We got on to a second rotation of dishes without being full because of the delays between getting plates. Only the coconut buns were truly amazing. And there were no chive pancakes! That combinded with Macaroni-Gate later that night at Monterey (they’d run out of mac’n cheese! OH GOD THE PAIN) was almost enough to make a girl cry.
So, what I want to know is, where should we go next time for Yum Cha, where the food will be served hot, it’ll be plentiful, there’ll be lots of fried stuff for my Whitey McWhite tastes, and I can get my chive pancake on?
Bonus terrible joke so you can pretend you’re at a hungover Yum Cha with me and I’m silly from lack of food:
Q. What’s that sound coming from the Bee Gees’ garden?
A. It’s just the chives talking
I have to agree, with NH and Kate B. We used to go to Grand Century every fortnight (a group of 4 of us) and found there were big gaps between food being brought out, we had to ask several times for more tea and more soy sauce, and for any cold drinks. And often the food was cold. We changed to Regal about a year ago and have never had a bad experience. The food is consistently hot and superb. But because of this blog post, next week we are going to try Dragons Chinese.
Regal is amazing!
People who go to Yum Cha during any other day than the traditional Sunday should expect it to be disappointing.
Be interesting to know what time you went as food only gets cold near the end of yum cha time.
They just don’t cook for the crowds every other day. Glad you wont be going back 🙂
We went on a Sunday at 12pm. I’m pretty sure that’s about as peak as you can get. But thanks for your welcome.