Quick business trip to the Big Tuocha this week to discuss sticking the world together. Aside from obligatory sipping (pre-high-roast TGY) at Tea Gallery and giving a Chinese lady advice on oolongs at Kam Man, only interesting tea experience came poking around herbalists in Chinatown. I try to look into a few each visit, in generally vain hope of finding salient treasure - un-buried and on open display, as they often profess not to speak English or understand the terms Pu'erh, pulay, bolay, bonay, tuocha or beengcha. (My accent could not possibly be at fault.)
On this occasion, I was interested to see how Kamwo has moved tea to the front of the shop, with fancier and more marketing-oriented packaging. But saw nothing of compelling interest.
Better luck (perhaps) at Yue Fung at 53 Elizabeth St., head office among nine stores around town. Nice-looking place, plenty of dried lizards and trepang. And around the back, a generous display of Pu-erh in several forms: about ten different bings, tuos and fangchas, each available singly or in larger bundle/stack/tong.
Prices per item ran $4-20 or so; only over-$10 items were a CNNP-label bing and one other. One of these had a yellow mold I've only seen on a
1960s PRC heicha cake, and scared me off. Other smelled odd and looked weird in a bleached kind of way. I bought most of the others, including a Xiaguan and one of those universal red-on-white 250g black fangchas of variable quality that smelled quite nice. The greens smelled too much like fresh hay for my taste, but the blacks seemed more fragrant and less musty than usual. Might take a while to taste them all. In the meanwhile, thought I'd mention this in case any locals want to have a peek. Proprietors seemed nice enough, but no English at all. A customer spoke just enough of same to help me make the purchase, but not enough to gather more info on the offerings.Hope that's useful to someone-
DM
P.S. - While enjoying stewing beef tendon and knuckles, I again failed to try the braised pork bung at a native eatery. We all have limits...