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• NOT YUMMY Yum Cha

I went to Tian Ci on a strong recommendations of a friend who said they have the best vegetarian yum cha in Sydney. So off I went with a great expectation, but the yum cha dishes fell awfully short. Firstly, you have to wait more than 30 mins to get the dishes out. When the dishes finally arrived, they don't look as good. The har gau (vegetarian prawn dumplings) looked frail and the pastry looking not fresh and broken, then the taste was just absolutely bland and not fresh. The same thing happenned with their sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf, vegetable dumplings, and the vegetable BBQ pork buns. Really disappointing. Later I had a strong feeling that those yum cha dishes were probably already frozen and heated as ordered. But why took so long to serve? I have tasted much better - the best yum cha is still Green Gourmet at Newtown! Another day I came at around 2:30pm and the waiter told me that the kitchen already closed (well they wrote their closing time is supposedly 3pm) and the chef could not make anything for me. After I begged (since I had to travel 1 hour to get there), the waiter finally agreed to cook one dish for me but not to dine in, but only to take away. I chose the lunch special, crispy soy chicken with rice. It looked good and tastes good too. But I felt disappointed by the service and the yum cha. This is a thought: Opening a vegetarian restaurant is supposedly not for profit, but more to promote vegetarianism/veganism by giving convenience to fellow vegetarians/vegans and people who started to learn to be a vegetarian. We are doing our bits to contribute to this earth, and since we know being vegetarian is still quite difficult for most people, vegetarian restaurants are there to provide convenience so more and more people will be willing to be vegetarians, right? But why, most vegetarian and vegan restaurants have to open late at 11am and then to closed between 3pm-5pm? This is not a total convenience for some who did not have time to lunch by midday. Maybe because there is only one chef in the kitchen? But it does not make sense...... Think about this, restaurant owners! You carries a noble task to propagate vegetarianism to everyone! So do it with all your heart! If your motivation to open a vegetarian restaurant is profit, then you are absolutely lost!