Who's the celebrity?

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Plans for lunch today fell apart when the majority of people who promised attendance dropped off one by one.  A last-minute change of plan was made, and a few of us ended up at Celebrity Cuisine (名人坊) - which earned itself a macaron from the chubby baby.

Dim sum was the natural choice for lunch, and pricing was pretty reasonable.  I'm not sure whether it's because we arrived pretty late for lunch, but the quality of the items were below my expectations.  I've had a few dinners here and my overall impressions have been reasonably good.

Pan-fried radish cake (煎蘿蔔糕) - there were thin strands of radish but the overall texture was pretty mushy, and prone to falling apart when picked up by the chopsticks.  Interestingly I tasted bits of liver sausage (潤腸) inside, which is not normally used.  Complemented perfectly by the excellent in-house XO sauce.

Pan-fried baby pigeon (炸乳鴿) - excellent.  There was a milky/creamy flavor to it all, and it was very well seasoned...and just a tad too salty for me.  Crispy skin with very juicy meat - what little of it there was anyway...

Crab-in-a-box (大良鮮蟹盒) - since I didn't copy the menu items, I'm using my old crappy translation from a year ago.  The batter was excellent - full of the oil used to deep-fry it - and the crab roe inside was decent.  Best with some Worcestershire sauce.

Deep-fried dumplings (咸水角) - pretty disappointing.  The dough outside was too mushy, and not enough filling inside.

Steamed prawn dumplings (蝦餃) - a disaster.  Waaaaay over-steamed, to the point the three dumplings became "conjoined" and any attempt to separate them resulted in holes in the skins.  The dumplings were huge and filled with prawns, but quanity didn't make up for the shortfall in quality.  This reminds me of the ones at Dim Sum (譽滿坊), as those are almost always over-steamed also.  In the movie God of Cookery (食神), Stephen Chow would probably have shouted "零分(Zero)!"

Fish marrow with scallions and garlic in claypot (砂鍋薑蔥魚云) - I'm not a big fan of fishhead, so this was never gonna thrill me.  The soft gelatin "marrow" behind the gills was kinda nice I guess... but pretty "fishy" even with the scallion and garlic. 

Deep-fried seafood bowl (金錢海鮮盒) - very ho-hum.  Looks like a stuffed shiitake mushroom, but in reality it's a piece of toast at the bottom, topped with mashed potato mixed with chives, tiny shrimps and some crunchy water chestnut bits, with a few very thin wafers of shiitake mushroom on the surface for decoration.  Dunno what to make of this, except that it's kinda like an alternative version of the shrimp toast (蝦多士)...

Honestly, this was a pretty disappointing lunch.  Not exactly star-worthy in my view.  The chef came out and asked what we thought of the food, but given that he's a friend of a friend, I didn't have the heart to give him my honest opinion...