Bad yum cha

Nathan and I went for 'all you can eat' yum cha a few days ago.

You'd think that a yum cha buffet would be a joyous experience. It was not.

The problem?

They ran out of food!

We knew something wasn't quite right when the food carts being pushed around mostly consisted of the same three things: shark fin dumpling, glutinous rice, and bbq pork buns. Unfortunately, the shark fin dumpling is a no go zone (for environmental reasons) and both the glutinous rice and pork buns are, in my opinion, white people's food.

Where we all the other yum cha classics? Over the course of two hours (I insisted that we persevere even though Nathan wanted to go home), we scored ourselves a few chicken feet, some sui mai and a bowl of congee, but the situation was pretty dire.

There was no sighting of prawn dumplings or radish cakes or even a plate of steamed Chinese broccoli! There was no beef offal or beef balls or even steamed tripe. Wtf?

Eventually I asked one of the trolley ladies what was going on and she admitted that the kitchen had under-prepared and ran out of everything (except for shark fin dumplings, glutinous rice and pork buns).

It got even more dire when even the chicken feet ran out and the staff were resorted to serving plates of marinated peanuts! Peanuts!

It was at that stage that I finally lost hope and we left.