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