News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 21 (entry 1)

Tue Feb 21 2006 23:40 Occupation by more than 868 persons unlawful: Today I went to lunch with Josh Lerner, Rich Mintz, et al. at Jing Fong, a dim sum restaurant. This was the largest restauraunt I have ever been in. It was huge. There were ladies who rolled carts full of food from table to table and foisted food onto us. But it was very cheap: five people ate a huge amount of food for about $45.

I am not a huge fan of dim sum because honestly I find genuine Chinese food kind of weird. I feel that this is in some sense okay because I read an article in Gourmet about the article writer taking some visiting top Chinese chefs to the French Laundry and other fancy Bay Area restaurants, and them generally thinking everything was gross and weird (though one chef liked the oysters at a Fisherman's Wharf oyster bar). I figure if it's okay for actual chefs to be that un-cosmopolitan, I can be too.

Not that I went hungry. I like the sticky pork buns a lot, so I had two of those. There was also a vegetable of the brocolli/cauliflower/brussel sprout family which was also very good, and a dessert bun with red bean paste. But some of the other stuff I tried made me queasy. And I always felt like a friend's mother was coming around with a cart every few minutes urging me to eat more.