Thankful I am that I got to go to one of my favorite places for a dim sum buffet during the month of my birthday.
I'm not just glad that there's a buffet.
I'm glad for the one who brought me there.
Because, if you're someone who loves dim sum (like me), a couple of baskets here and there ain't enough.
You will want to have more, and you will want to have enough of them little bite-size pieces as much as you can until you feel like you've got enough.
I don't know about you, but that's how I always feel whenever I go for dim sum- whether it be at Yum Cha, Swee Choon, 126 or elsewhere.
This afternoon we were here for the buffet, and of course, we wasted no time ordering some of our favorites here.
The buffet menu here at Yum Cha is one of the more interesting ones which I've seen.
I'm not sure about the other places, but here you get the categories of fried, steamed, mains and desserts, all of which you can order from and as many as you like.
At another time I might go for the mains which include century egg pork porridge or a dish of vegetables, but today we decided we'd choose variety and so looked all over the menu to get the ones we wanted.
One of the very first things we ordered was the bean curd roll, which, with its gentle tear of the bean curd skin, brought the flavor of the prawn and turnip (I think it's turnip) fillings right into your mouth. Even someone who's not a fan of bean curd or tofu would find this roll tasty, crunchy and appetizing.
We also ordered the prawn puffs, which, when served to the table, were so perfectly fried that the skin gave you that satisfying kraaack sound when you bit into the edges, and was just as crisp with the prawns inside warm and hot upon first bite.
Amongst all these dishes that we ordered there were the egg tarts.
Special mention must be made of these.
They're one of my best loves.
Here at Yum Cha they're served in threes, and although I think it's meant to be shared between a pair or a group, I alone ate them all- in the way that I like eating them these days- scooping up the custard with my spoon, then eating the pastry after.
Besides the egg tarts there was an order which I call the pork pie.
Okay, so I don't know its actual name but at first look it resembles a croissant of light pastry stuffed with minced pork inside.
Think of it as a combination of East and West together.
The great thing about this is the way it is cut- easy to pick up with chopsticks and everyone can get an equal share.
We didn't just have the fried, of course.
There were two, or was it three, baskets of xiao long bao- which we usually try not to leave out whenever we're here- and then along with it, we decided to have a portion of their char siew baos.
Don't chuckle at our choice.
Yes, there might be frozen ones out there on the shelves of the supermarkets but those here at Yum Cha have a fluffiness and a balance in the sweet filling to the degree that you know they're created for the dim sum diner, not run-of-the-mill from a well-oiled machine on the factory floor.
But I guess we do have a special liking for the fried- because at the very last minute we decided that fried chicken wings were worth filling up our stomachs for, and we added the order.
Come to think of it, we ought to have ordered them first.
They are, after all, also a favorite of ours, and somehow I think we might have appreciated them better had we munched through those crispy, tasty, perfectly fried chicken wings when we were not yet this full.
Still there was room enough for dessert, and boy, we pushed it, ordering a bowl of mango pudding, a bowl of guilingao and a bowl of almond jelly.
Let's just say that the mango pudding was really very pudding, the almond jelly made me think of Chinese restaurant meals which I used to have a long, long time ago, and the guilingao was more power than we assumed it would be. :)