626 Night Market + King Hua

Crossing the 9th place I had left on the 10 Best Dim Sum Restaurants in Los Angeles, followed up by a trip to Half n Half and then the second 626 Night Market-- and hoping it would be better than the disaster that the first one was!

Dim sum at King Hua was very good. Char shu bao, pei dan jook (congee), shu mai, all excellent. Shu mai were a modest step down, as was the pai gut (pork spareribs) and the har cheung fun (they looked pretty, but again, taste wasn't quite there). Randomly we ordered chicken as well (not bad). The inside isn't much to look at, sort of mid-range Chinese restaurant with no carts, but hell, it was very solid. Plus they have tons of parking, always a plus!

Killed time at Half and Half in Pasadena afterwards. Lots of pearl tea and Cards Against Humanity. I have to say, as nice as it is to play outside in the shade on a beautiful day, CAH is a bit graphic of a game to play in public. I hope we didn't traumatize any small children with our bouts of laughter!

Made it to the second 626 Night Market afterwards. They'd moved it a few blocks over to a much larger space at Pasadena City Hall. Maybe six times more space, a lot of people excited to go, but still a lot of people turned off by the disaster the first time was: in the end, it all worked out! They probably could've had 1.5x or 2x the crowd they actually had show up and it still would've been fine. Much of the venue actually felt fairly empty! Five separate areas: two for food vendors, one right in front of City Hall of mostly empty space (and Dodge/Fiat cars on display), an area of food trucks and more food, then an area of shopping. Not very many places to sit, but that didn't seem to bother people.

Highlights: Mama Musubi's drinks and awesome musubi (Nieman Ranch pork, yum!), Takken for pork belly skewers, and gawking at the azuki pancakes and the (relatively) few vendors who had crazy long lines-- almost all of those vendors had signs exclusively in Chinese. If that's not authentic tastes from the crowd, I don't know what is...