Whole New Gastronomic Experience

We walked quickly through Chinatown in the light rain on Sunday to find lunch, and spontaneously picked a restaurant called Pepper Chilli. We had just finished viewing the Australian Impressionism exhibit at the art museum and as we contemplated lunch options, it began to rain. I started dreaming of hot tea. The art show was interesting, but took a certain kind of energy. It was fairly crowded, so we were required to slowly inch along in a line of people to see many of the paintings. Those listening to the self-guided audio tours never seem to be aware of anything else around them, so we'd had to wait patiently for them to move aside to read the small print near the art work. (Why is that print so tiny, anyway? It does nothing to encourage someone to understand the art, since you have fight the crowd to get up so close to read it)...Pretty soon I was only looking at every other painting, then maybe half in a group of six, and- by the final room- just the largest ones with the biggest explanations. I love Impressionist painting, so I occasionally felt a pinch of guilt when doing this, as I do while reading an anthology of stories and I decide to skip over a few of them, but it enhances the ones I do spend the time and energy to absorb. Anyway- at the restaurant, which has Peking, Shanghai, and Szechuan cuisine, we got a table and ordered a pot of hot tea. To our surprise, there was no menu and no explanations; the waitresses just started coming by with trays and carts of steamy, tempting dishes. Although the sign outside had advertised "Yum cha" we had no clue what it meant. We soon suspected there were some rules associated with this we were equally clueless about. The website was "spot on" in suggesting "why not let us surprise you with a whole new gastronomic experience". We gave enthusiastic nods to several dishes before starting to wonder how much all this was going to cost. Each time we approved a dish, it was immediately placed on our table and the waitress stamped or scribbled something on a section of the bill. It's an interesting experience to dine and not have any real sense of the food or the prices. The five or six dishes we tried were absolutely delicious, which made it challenging to restrain ourselves when more carts came by. This is not a good restaurant for indecisive diners- in a couple instances, our failure to decide quickly resulted in the waiter moving on to the next table. My favorite was a dish with thick, white noodles and thin slices of meat- it tasted like peanut butter. Other favorites were the dumplings, and of course, the hot tea. It ended up being a wonderful meal, and good experience for those of us who like to think we're always in control and knowledgeable about other cultures (I don't know anyone like that...). Here is another take on it. I'd go back to Pepper Chilli in a heartbeat. And our bill? About $30 each, a reasonable price for a nice meal for two in Melbourne.