Big Three Happiness....what was I thinking?

Reason can sometimes lead you astray. It seemed to me that with excellent dim sum available at several nearby competitors, market forces should have conspired to improve the quality of the dim sum at bth. Was I ever mistaken.

Lured by the memory of succulent char siu served over anise scented yellow beans, and luscious pork and onion pastries from the long faded glory days of bth dim sum, we returned Friday to see if things had improved any since our last dissapointing visits nearly a decade ago. They had not. Things have actually gone downhill in every respect (except one..the restaurant is a bit cleaner now than it was in the old days.).

Perhaps the big tables of Chicago public school children in matching t-shirts should have tipped me off. The lack of cart service was not a good sign (but after all ,even Phoenix has given up on cart service during the week). Noticing that there were only a few asians in the room and that they seemed to have been roped in by a guide working a casino bus tour, my radar started to ping but I plunged stupidly ahead.

The food was awful. Old tasting, greasy , nothing at the right temperature. The service matched perfectly. Indifferent and sullen sometimes almost hostile.
The BBQ pork was the last straw. Instead of the wonderful stuff I recalled having years ago, what we got were leathery dried out bits of hog cadavar that probably weren't very good when they were fresh.

We left after that even though several dishes were yet to be served. I don't recall ever walking out on a meal midway anywhere but this was really too much. I actually felt insulted.

Maybe I caught them on a particularly bad day.
Maybe I'll try again in another decade or two.
Maybe not.