my shanghi experience

since i’ve known her, the curious mouth introduced me to 2 new culinary experiences:

1. ramen noodles without the soup like liquid. i know i know… it’s just common sense that you don’t have to make the noodle soup. just strain the water out after you boil it, then you can use it just like any other noodle. but after growing up for years calling the product “ramen soup” as opposed to ramen noodles, it just seemed like that’s exactly what it was.

2. the phenomena called dim sum.

this entry is about the latter.

sometimes, on a sunday morning at around 11, we go to shanghi experience in movie towne for dim sum. what is dim sum? doh frighten, i was just getting to that. basically, it’s like a festival of steamed and fried bite sized chinese foods. dumplings, rolls, pieces of meat etc. oh… and there’s green tea too.

dim sum actually means “to touch your heart” and it is said to have been a cantonese custom. farmers after workin hard in the fields will go to their favourite tea house and drink tea, eat and talk ole talk. on the menu you find things like pot stickers, dumplings, small pows, sticky rice and a host of other interesting things. if you don’t eat shrimp or pork, forget it though. it’s mostly pork, some shrimp and a liiiiiiittle bit of other stuff. to me, it’s the damn thing self on a sunday. hit dat, head home and just relax. it puts you in that frame of mind. maybe it’s the green tea.

we’ve been going to dim sum at shanghi for quite some time. even introduced a few people to it (kinda like what i’m doing now.) and the experience has been good. they walk around with trollies of differnet things, and you just select portions off of it. some of them even go on a hot surface for a little sizzle right in front of you on the table.

but today was more than disappointing. the curious mouth is in no way at all curious about pork. it gets her sick actually. so her dim sum experience is based on shrimp. considering the menu is made up of dishes like char siu bao, har gao, wu gok and such stuff that we can’t even pronounce right now, we rely on seeing the dish and/or remembering the ingredients. the mouth ordered a shrimp dumpling. the girl serving took out the dish. the mouth questioned it. she assured us that it is the shrimp dumpling. on sampling, the mouth realized that it was in fact the very pork that she doesn’t eat.

after bringing it to their attention, showing them the content of the dumpling to prove that she wasn’t making it up and asking them if they happened to have any benadryl because she’s alergic to the swine, we got nothing more than a sorry about that… no benadryl and the drug store here isn’t open. not even from a manager. further to that, while i was thinking that it would have been appropriate to comp the entire meal to make up for the physically harmful inconvenience, a request to take the once bitten imposter of a shrimp dumpling off the bill was met with some resistance. but the seriousness and urgency conveyed by the mouths gradually escalating voice seemed to solve that.

all in all, as unacceptable as that entire scene was, it might be a little unfair to present a totally terrible review based on one bad experience that came after a series of good ones. everybody deserves a 2nd chance, so we’ll see how it goes on a sunday soon to come.

leh we bubble.