Yummy Yum Cha

The thing I like most about going to yum cha is cheung fun (rice noodle rolls).

In fact, I'm sure that for a long time, I confused the feeling of seeing the cart with the silver lids with the feeling of true love.

The second thing I like most about yum cha is that there isn't as much pressure to order something great, because you get to sample many dishes. For those who haven't had the pleasure, yum cha is normally around brunch / lunch (usually sessions are at 11 / 12:30 / 1:30), and you get to sit at a table while people wheel carts of food around for you to order from.

Each of the dishes (dim sum - not to be confused with dim sim!) are quite small, roughly dumpling-sized (and many of the dishes are dumplings), and the idea is that you order many dishes and share them. If you have a large enough table, you will usually get a lazy susan (the round spinny thing in the middle), to make it easier to pass dishes around. As you order, the staff keep track by circling a sheet of paper, with each dish being in a certain category depending on how much it costs.

At the end, they add up all the circles and you get your bill. Quite cleverly, they don't list how much each dish costs, so you don't really think about how much you're really spending. Also, as is tradition when dining out with family, there's usually a fight to be the one who gets to pay the bill. Sometimes this happens with friends, but in my experience, the trend is just to split the bill evenly (with people paying for their own drinks).

Speaking of drinks, as yum cha literally means "drink tea", you usually get tea, and there will be a flat charge per person for the tea, which gets refilled by the waiters. To indicate that your teapot needs refilling, you normally turn the lid of the teapot on its side or upside down. If there are lots of teapots, there will usually be one teapot that just has hot water in it, so you can water down the tea if you think it's too strong.

The tables are round, with the person / people who will be ordering food seated closest to where the carts are going to be. Though I have noticed more and more English-speaking staff, as a general rule, most of the waiters will speak broken English at best, usually being fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. There are waiters who don't push carts around, and instead carry trays to collect empty dishes. They will also usually take special orders to the kitchen, in case you missed out on something, or there is something you want that is less popular, so they don't bother bringing it out on the carts and only make it to-order.

I've never had it myself, but one of the things that you can get at yum cha that you normally can't get anywhere else is chicken feet (top left - sorry for the grainy photo, it accidentally got deleted, and this was the recovered version).

There isn't that much meat, as you would expect, as chicken feet aren't all that meaty, and there are a lot of bones. But some people seem to love it. It's a pretty divisive thing - and there's almost always one left, with the table split between those who have eaten one egging on those who haven't had one to try it, and those who haven't had one trying there best to convince those who do like them to eat the last one.

I still haven't worked out what the ideal group size for yum cha is. Most of the dishes come with three serves, but some are only two. So you would think six is best, but in my experience, not everyone tends to eat everything, so you always end up with a dish that has one thing left, going around and around and around, until someone takes pity on it and eats it. Two people definitely isn't enough, as you end up filling up too early and not getting the variety of dishes that makes yum cha fun.

Speaking of filling up, another yum cha tradition is not to eat breakfast beforehand, something else which is divisive. Some people are in the "if you don't eat breakfast, your stomach will shrink" camp, and some people are in the "if you don't eat breakfast, you save space for more food" camp. Personally, I'm in the latter, but I love my breakfast, so I usually eat breakfast before yum cha.

And on the topic of filling up, they usually serve bao (buns), and I've noticed (and this is going to be racist) that when I eat with Asian people, they tend to avoid bao, as it takes up more space. When I eat with non-Asian people, they love going for bao. Here's the racist part, I'm trying to figure out why, and a simple explanation is that they know they can get it elsewhere, so they prefer to eat the things that are yum cha-only things (like chicken feet). The racist explanation is that it's worse value for money. If the bill is split evenly amongst everyone, and eating a bao takes the space of three other foods, then you're getting less food per dollar. And Asians are supposedly notorious for being stingy.

Except, as I mentioned earlier, there's usually a fight to pay the bill - so how can you want to pay the bill, and be stingy at the same time? Well, part of the mentality of wanting to pay the bill is that you want to show that you are doing well in your life, but you also want to take care of your own. It's MrFodder who explained this to me: the stingy Chinese stereotype has a lot of basis in the fact that there's a strong in-group / out-group mindset in China. Since there's a huge problem with overpopulation, and limited resources, people will fight for what they can get, and will usually do whatever they can to get stuff for themselves, their family and their friends. This can look like selfishness, as they will take far more than they need, but that's because they plan to distribute it to others. And they'd rather the stuff went to their family and friends, and not some stranger's family and friends.

It's probably a hard mindset to break out if, even when you're in a country like Australia where it's not as much of an issue. In general, I don't think Chinese people purposely go out of their way to be stingy or rude, some of it is just a cultural misunderstanding. Though there are always exceptions...

Anyway, yum cha is great.