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| - The only thing even qualifying little Cha Lau for one star is its decor (and lucky for them, Yelp doesn't allow anything lower).
Came in here with a friend for a dim-sum lunch. Walked out the door 30 minutes later with a few unpleasant, overpriced pieces of what they tried to pass as "dim sum" in our stomachs and frowns on our faces. I should've taken the quiet interior of the place as warning. I should also have taken the rude greetings of the hostess to a fellow patron ("what do you want?" - I'm not even kidding you! and not letting him sit wherever he wanted in a dead empty restaurant!!!!) as double warning.
The menu was not particularly impressive, but we ordered a few items and waited in anticipation of the meal that was to satisfy our big dim sum craving. My eyes widened when the items were brought out - NOT because they were impressive, but because they were so small I had to open my eyes bigger to try and spot what miniscule servings of food I was entitled to have (I'm exaggerating... sort of? not really).
And the flavour? NO THANKS. The sticky rice in lotus leaf was bland as heck, and the pork pastry contained trace amounts of pork... and I couldn't even be sure that the ingredients that were used were of any decent quality --- were they just left over scraps from somewhere else?
So we voiced our concerns in an effort to give suggestions to the chef for the future, but this quickly turned into a hostile show down with the hostess. This was in Cantonese, so I'm giving second hand information but she was not apologetic in her tone, words, or action. I'm told that the server suggested that maybe we did not know how the Chinese dishes were supposed to taste (uh, what!?) and responded with "you don't have to eat it" and immediately assumed we were trying to get a free meal out of the experience.
So, we walked out with our dim sum needs extremely unmet and our moods dampened, but it was such a terrible experience that I was just happy to not be stuck in that environment anymore. I hope she noticed it was not a free meal we were looking for because we touched maybe 1/4 of our food.
Nowadays when I walk by Cha Lau and see a bunch of innocent folks inside trying to stomach their food, I just sigh with empathy and sadness that I could not spare folks from walking through their doors in time.
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