Sympathy and tea

[muckefuck]

I've been feeling listless lately for little reason. Fortunately, I was able to overcome it today long enough to meet Mozhu and her writer husband along with lhn and prilicla to trade China tourist stories over dim sum in South Chinatown. The venue was Shui Wah (新瑞華) which was new to all of us; I'd been interested it as an ordinary restaurant ever since I discovered it specialised in Teochiu cuisine and I didn't even realise they served dim sum. The draw is that there are no carts: Everything is cooked to order. This prompted me to order something I normally avoid like the plague: "grease sticks", a.k.a. "Chinese doughnuts" or "deep-fried devils". They were so fresh, I almost burnt my mouth! Fortunately, the "kitchen sink" congee followed soon afterwards so I had something slightly cooler to dunk them in.

Overall, I didn't taste a great deal of difference in the ordinary dumpling dishes. The one revelatory experience came in the form of those little yellow jelly roll segments that I've never learned the Chinese name for. I've never had them piping hot before; it makes them seem so much lighter (the sponge is actually fairly eggy and heavy) that I may not be able to go back to eating them cold. The bill was also what dim sum should be: Less than $10/person (unlike that rip-off meal we got at Furama last weekend. There must've been an error in the check, but I was with a largish group and no one felt like taking the initiative to fight it.)

monshu and I had a couple of errands to complete, such as purchasing a departmental backscratcher for the use of his employees and hitting Ten Ren for tea. Did I mention that while we were in China, we came across a chain of tea shops called "Ten Fu" but with absolutely identical logos and branding? We couldn't figure out who was copying who. Now, with jars of Ten Fu brand tea for sale at Ten Ren, the mystery thicks.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Did I mention that while we were in China, we came across a chain of tea shops called "Ten Fu" but with absolutely identical logos and branding? We couldn't figure out who was copying who.

Lee Rieho
Chairman of TenRen's Tea and TenFu Group

As the saying goes, "where there is a will, there is a way," our group Chairman Lee Rieho, with his enthusiasm toward tea as well as his perseverance to the career, has developed two well-known brands of tea: Ten Ren Tea and Ten Fu Tea, and has contributed to make tea manufacturing from an conventional trade into a professional and modern group.

--http://www.unclelee.com/about_tenren.php

While the exact company structure isn't entirely clear (the "About Ten Fu Inc." section is actually about Ten Fu's Tea Museum), it looks like we're basically talking different interrelated branches of the same organization. (I get the impression that Ten Ren is the Taiwanese branch of the company and Ten Fu the PRC subsidiary, but that may not be correct.)

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Do you remember if there were any items you avoided at Shui Wah because they had absolutely no meat in them?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, I'm the one who insisted on the purely vegetarian soybean skin rolls (although I did have lhn's shellfish allergy in mind when I selected them).