Sky Phoenix, Sydney

Sky Phoenix

Level 3

Skygarden Shopping complex

Okay, so some of you might be able to tell that I hardly blog about chinese food, especially not yum cha. For me it's like "chinese food? meh~ I eat it all the time" or "yum cha? meh~ It's always the same selection of food". But this time was an exception. We went to Sky Phoenix, a place that has always given me the impression of "catered to westerners" and very very expensive. After that day both of these impressions were confirmed but there were still a few surprises.

I only took snaps of food we rarely eat, things I thoguht were out of the ordinary for Asian yum cha-ers so there really aren't that many pictures. The food in general was a mixture of hit and misses and the service was HILARIOUS!

So everyone knows that "yum cha" literally translates to "drink tea" right? Well of course you'd have a pot of hot tea on your table. Our tea? The water was only warm-ish so the brew came out really weak and luke warm. Then there was the "catered to westerners" thing. All service was conducted in broken english (I must admit it was a bit better than some of the ones in Chinatown) even though we were trying to talk in Chinese to them. It was only after they realised we couldn't understand their english that they'd ffinally revert back to chinese. There was this one trolley girl that kept promoting "chicken chip", she went past us three times telling us she had "chicken chip", even showing us the steamer and I couldn't get what it was. It was only after we left that we were like oooooh....chicken TRIPE....no...wait a sec...BEEF tripe! LOL

But enough of that, let me get into the food.

Chicken Pie

Its a general rule that we never order chicken pies. But this one looked really attractive thus the exception. The pastry was sweet and delish but I didn't think that it went too well with the savoury filling. A sweet filling would have been much better.

Okay, I have NO IDEA what this is called in English. All I can say is that we usually eat the steamed version but since we were doing the whole not-too-asian thing we got the deep fried version. I hated it. There was hot oil squirting out and burning your mouth with every bite and the filling wasn't that great either. 

Deep fried gluttinous balls with taro filling

These looked sooo light and fluffy that I couldn't resist. These were going to be the highlight of the meal until I reached the very centre and started tasting something salty...

See the tinge of yellow in the middle??

I thought it was just me but after a few more bites I was positive it wasn't me. IT WAS CHEESE. Yucky artificial-y kraft cheese or the likes of it by what I could gather.  That just ruined EVERYTHING. Gluttinous balls - sweet. Taro - sweet. WHY ON EARTH DID THEY PUT SOME CHEESE IN THE MIDDLE??

Sigh* Everything pictured above had to be doggy bagged and taken home. The yum cha basics - the usual stuff like siu mai and chicken feet were okay. But these? Maybe someone else might enjoy them...