Those who know me will know that I have a special penchant for dim sum- and not necessarily at yum cha time.
Dim sum is, after all, one of those foods that can fit into the category of formal sit down meal, casual-formal sit down meal, casual eatery cha chaan teng meal, or snack street food style that you wolf down as you walk, or in the car.
Before frozen dim sum was a thing I used to crave for siew mais (back then they were expensive) or have char siew bao only once a week in the car.
Things are however slightly different now where if I want to I can get a pack of frozen siew mais from the supermarket, and if I want to, I can go have a sit down meal at a restaurant.
Canton Paradise falls into what I call the casual-formal category when it comes to afternoon dim sum at 30% discount.
It very much depends on the outlet you go, I think, and although I can't recollect exactly which outlet it was that we were at- it might have been Bedok, it might have been Parkway Parade or Paya Lebar- but it was, I'm pretty sure, a casual-formal one.
I remember the light, I remember the ambience, I remember the staff and I remember the crowd.
That doesn't mean that I have no inkling about the food.
Of course not.
You don't forget meat dumplings done spicy in some sort of mala oil.
They were so good.
Then again, neither do you forget paus (two kinds!), cheong fun and a bowl of porridge done thick in the Cantonese style.
It's a wonder how something simple (almost ordinary) like a char siew pau can make you feel this cherished, and this full.
I loved how the soft and fluffy paus were filled almost to the brim with little melty chunks of Char Siew in their sweet, redder than red, delicious sauce.
I loved how satisfied one pau (and one pau only) made me feel even though there were three in the basket, and there were another three more on the other plate.
It had to be that either the filling was very solid, or that the flour of the pau was.
We split the third char siew pau into two, my friend and I, half half each, and we did the same for the plate of salted egg lava buns as well.
I would be lying if I said that lava buns haven't become my new favorite dim sum in recent years.
There is, after all, something charming about biting into each bun carefully, and seeing the salted egg sauce ooze its way out.
Doesn't mean that I eat it this way with my hands all the time though.
There're occasions where I use chopsticks, and they're pretty convenient. All I need to do is to twist a little bit of the bun out, pick it up with chopsticks and spoon, then slowly suck the salted egg lava out.
This afternoon I decided to have these buns using my hands.
There was no time (nor patience) for the chopsticks.
Especially since the rest of our food had already arrived.
I took a fancy to everything on the table.
Like the cheong fun, which was char siew, and whose rice rolls, I must say, were thicker and chewier and rounder than the factory-made chee cheong fun that I'm mostly used to.
It's always nice to have a good chew of rice roll when it comes to things like cheong fun.
Somehow it makes the dish feel more solid, more appetizing, more comforting, just like how dim sum is supposed to be.
Same it was with the pork porridge too, where, as anticipated, it was the smooth, silky Cantonese style kind that slid its way onto your tongue from the spoon and flowed all around your mouth, giving you that immediate, instant sense of warmth like all good porridges will do.
I can't say which of all these dishes were our favorites but the dumplings in mala- those we particularly liked.
There was something surprisingly wholesome about it, something unexpectedly warm.
It might have been the size of the dumplings itself.
It might also have been how they'd been done, where, different from wanton dumplings, these here were larger- almost siew mai size- and where the smooth skin texture wrapped around carefully boiled teeny weeny balls of little minced meat let you pop one straight into your mouth, giving you a burst of warm, meaty flavors with silky skin, plus that slightly spicy taste of mala that titillated your taste buds but (unlike other dishes) didn't overwhelm your tongue with the spice.
So, despite the fact that we were really rather full, we ordered another bowl.
And so we had two.