David's Tea House, San Pablo CIty

My mom has been bugging me about eating at this new restaurant that was under construction for the past few weeks at Puregold, San Pablo City. It came to the point that she was bugging me almost everyday why the place wasn't open yet and of course I had no answer.

Personally, I'm always on the lookout for a new place to eat here in the city, and when I saw that David's Tea House was the name of the restaurant, I immediately looked it up online. It's one of many branches of a Chinese themed restaurant, and their menu looked really promising. To be quite honest, I was very excited. We do have a few Chinese themed restaurants in town, but David's Tea House looks like it's the most hardcore of the bunch. Hardcore meaning their menu is very deep with a lot of exotic and authentic Chinese dishes.

When I learned it had finally opened yesterday, I immediately set a date with the family to have lunch the following day, today.

I was so excited that I probably ordered more than we could possibly eat, but I wanted to try a lot of things and of course, we could have leftovers bagged for dinner. Some of the things had aside from the Seaweed and Century Egg pictured above were:

Hot and Sour Soup

One Half Fried Chicken

One Half Yang Chow Fried Rice and Beef with Ampalaya

Dimsum Platter

Hakaw

Shanghai Spring Rolls

Steamed Lapu-Lapu

WHEW! That was a lot huh? But I tasted them all, and all of them were pretty good.

I do have to give special mention to the Seaweed and Century Egg, which was just fantastic. I've never had seaweed before, at least not like this one. I was half expecting the green rubbery stems with tiny little balls, so this was some other kind of seaweed. It was served cold, which was a surprise. But as I said, it tasted quite extraordinary. Everyone on the table liked it.

Also, the the Century Egg was thankfully free of the ammonia smell that usually accompanies this type of egg. And that's how I like it. As dishes go, I give this 5 stars. I don't give this often, so that's probably saying something.

As for the rest, as I mentioned, they were perfectly good. I liked everything, specially the Hakaw and other items on the Dimsum Platter. The Hot and Sour soup was subtlety sour and not overpowering.

Their house tea (which is a complimentary item) was very nice. I was surprised it was Jasmine Tea. Normally, I hate Jasmine Tea because it smells like a Filipino wake. You know that smell. Similar to Sampaguita. That smell creeps me out now and depresses me. I don't want to be drinking anything that smells like that as well. But this Jasmine tea was nothing like that. When told it was Jasmine, I did start to notice subtle hints of it, but it wasn't enough to bother me.

I've really got nothing to complain about. The wait staff was very very attentive. They were very nice and even helped my mom and dad place food on their plates. The food arrived in a timely manner and we didn't have to wait for too long.

The only thing that disappointed me was that they didn't have any duck dishes. In fairness, it's not on their menu. It's not even on the menu on their website. But they do have a photo of it at that same website so it only made me wonder. I asked why they didn't have it, and they said that not enough people order the duck and the stocks just go to waste. Oh well.

Nevertheless, we had a great time. The food was great, and now my mom can stop bugging me.

Yep! Looks like we're a pretty happy bunch, specially my mom.

We definitely plan on coming back, specially me and Ilyn, to try their other dishes.