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