Re: [gardeners] OT: Recipe for the season
George Shirley (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Sat, 25 Jul 1998 07:37:28
At 11:44 PM 7/24/98 -0400, you wrote:
snipped for brevity
what I forgot to tell Margaret was
>that in a traditional Dim Sum restaurant, the food is only served
>from 11:00am to 3:00pm. You cannot get it for dinner. Young
>Chinese ladies come walking thru the restaurant pushing wagons
>loaded with an assortment of taste treats, and you flag them down
>and point... In former years, when you were finished with lunch,
>a waiter would come add up the number of small or medium empty
>plates which were stacked up on the table, and present you with
>the bill. They changed their system about 20 years ago, because
>too many people cheated. Now they mark a chart, as you eat.
Back when we worked foreign Miz Anne and I stopped in Hong Kong for a bit
of shopping. Tired of hotel food and feeling adventurous we went to a dim
sum restaurant for lunch. We were the only Caucasians in the place but the
Chinese were to polite to stare at us directly. There were a lot of
conversations going on sotto voce and lots of quick looks though. As the
baskets of dim sum were labelled in Chinese we had no idea what was in them
until we ate the contents. Must say they were all good, and we cleaned up
quite a few baskets. The ladies pushing the carts were all older women and
extremely polite and, yes, they marked a chart for each of us as we took
baskets. When it was time to pay I just held up a fistful of Hong Kong
dollars to the male cashier and he picked out what the cost of the meal was
and handed the rest back. All in all, it was a memorable experience and and
an excellent meal. Wish we had a dim sum restaurant nearby.
>
>Penny, NY
George, who awakened hungry this morning