Yum Cha for Chinese New Year, 2020

Sorry for the late upload guys, but life has kinda caught up on me, and I'm falling behind. I must say these last few weeks have been hard, and things might just get worse still, so I gotta take care of myself.

Anyway, this video is from Chinese New Year (the Year of the Rat), when we had Yum Cha in Chatswood. This restaurant, in the Mandarin Centre, is called Fortune Palace. If you're after an amazing yum cha experience, this may not the be the place for you. We did go on the actual day of Chinese New Year. There was no line, but yet we were told there was a time limit (90 minutes), after which we would be asked to leave. Don't you just love restaurants that do that?

The atmosphere was OK, but it was so hot and stuffy in there. There's no way we could have sat in there for the whole 90 minutes- maybe that was a ploy? The food was mediocre- my favourite pineapple buns were bitter on the inside, and there was a distinct lack of variety. No turnip cake, no chicken feet, nothing. In fact, the food carts stopped circulating after about 20 minutes, and we hardly saw any new dishes after that.

We did manage to get some nice dumplings at the supermarket below the restaurant, and ate them for dinner, which was much nicer than the actual yum cha. Otherwise, we didn't see much in the way of Chinese New Year festivities; the lion dancers were on their lunch break apparently. If you want to see some really cool lion dancing, I have a video from last year, which is linked within the video below.

I hope you guys have a great week, and in fact a great Year of the Rat. It hasn't started off all that well for the world, and I'm just hoping that things will get better soon. Fingers crossed. You miss normality when you don't have it anymore.

Take care, stay safe, and keep on creating.

D