Yum Cha at Chinahouse

...god doesn't that just scream RESTAURANT REVIEW!!!!!!

anyway. you and i both know we do shit differently here at TFP.

ANYhoo. I got to work ridiculously early as usual. so i'm hunting around for a new place to try for lunch. i work in the middle of chinatown, so chinese/asian restaurants are aplenty. my only other options are subway or fucking mcdonalds which fucked my order up for dinner.... yet again. must stop going there as it is evil anyways and not in a good way.

So i'm wandering around wickham st, looking at the place next to the Happy Chef BBQ, and i get my phone out of my pocket to check the time. I see I have a call coming through so I answer it. It's my friend Lee from work, and the conversation goes something like this:

ME: (answering phone in the midst of traffic whizzing past me) HELLO?
Lee: Hello...
ME: Where are you?
Lee: I'm at home...where are you?
ME: Uh.. i'm on wickham st standing outside the Superbowl....trying to find somewhere to have lunch.
Lee: Oh. Ok, i'm just getting ready for work...
ME: Well, do you want to get lunch or something?
Lee: Sure, where do you want me to meet you
ME: eh, I'll meet you outside the hotel (he lives in a hotel smack in the middle of the valley)
Lee: Ok, see you in a few minutes.

we hang up and i wander up brunswick st to meet him. so we're chatting away and walking back down brunswick st and Lee is all...so where do you want to eat...and im like... eh.. why don't we go try the Yum Cha at Chinahouse in the chinatown mall? We had gone there the other night for dinner, and the food wasn't bad, although a bit on the pricey side (i dunno...how much does one normally pay for decent chinese food? can you tell i'm fucking sheltered???) but they also do a Yum Cha lunch. (see here for a rundown on what Yum Cha is) I hadn't had Yum Cha for years, and I know it's something Lee hadn't experienced before, so we went up to the restaurant.

we sat down and ordered tea, and then patiently waited for the first trolley to roll by. we had... steamed bbq pork buns (my favourite yum cha dish other than maybe deep fried squid...), sweet pork dumplings, chicken rice flour noodle/roll and i had the deep fried sesame prawn roll, as Lee doesn't eat seafood.

so we ate our meal and drank tea, Lee commenting that the tea was nice and refreshing. the last thing we ordered was off a trolley full of desserts... Mango Pancake. OH MY GOD! This dish was like sex on a plate... a thin pancake... filled with cream and mango ... served cold... but so delicate and so light... i said to Lee.... this pretty much beats fried ice cream.... and he looked at me like... WTF... fried ice cream.... so i had to explain the concept to him... and he was like...ohhhh ok.

Now... for value for money... it's pretty good. the standard dishes are $3.80 each.. and by the time we left, we had paid around $26 for the 2 of us... which is pretty damn good if you ask me. And there are like 3 or 4 of each item on the one plate...so it's not like it's $3.80 for one item.

Will definitely be going back there... I think it was well worth it, and the experience reminded me of being a teenager when my mum used to take me for yum cha in perth... :)