It was the weekend when we wanted to just go out and get a drink — bubble tea specifically. No food, we told ourselves, since we already had dinner that night. We were not hungry anyway.

We knew of just the place to go …

… the new Pearl Castle in the Richmond Centre. This restaurant is just across from the McDonalds in the western side of Richmond Center. Lots of parking, so no fear of that.

This is a branch of the successful Pearl Castle on Sexsmith (also in Richmond). It seems like Pearl Castle is on an expansion drive. They even have a small outlet at the food court in Parker Place. That food court outlet is kind of odd to me because I would have thought that location would somewhat affect their branding. It would have been much better if they open any food court outlet in the Aberdeen Centre.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmuNnzJ3z-g]

They have a unique wall light thingy which changes colors (see the YouTube video above).  With lightings like these, the crowd is young and is very much an Asian youngster hangout. So it was rather noisy and definitely very busy. We had to wait for a table but since this restaurant is also big, the wait was just 10 minutes.

Anyway, this outlet seems like it will be successful. The location is great and there are no real competition within walking distance.

Like the original Pearl Castle on Sexsmith, they have a separate menu just for drinks. The problem is they ran out of most of them. We ordered Iced Shaves and Grass Jelly Frappes but they came back a few minutes later saying that they are out of Frappes and Ice Shaves. Not good. Maybe it was because it was quite late in the night already.

The only things they had left was milk teas. So we ended up with … Grass Jelly Milk Tea ($5.25) and Chocolate Bubble Tea ($4.50). We did not like the shape of the glasses they were served in. It looked tall but we wished there were more. We slurped almost all of it dry even before the food came.

The day before we in Rodney’s Oyster House where we had their Panfried Oysters. We ordered their Fried Oysters for comparison. Just for fun, here is our meaningless comparison:

	Pearl Castle	Rodney’s Oyster House
Price	$6.75	$10.95
Sauce	Sweet Chili Sauce	Tartar Sauce
Oyster Size	Tiny	Respectable
No of Pieces	Many	Six
Flavour	Intense	Light
Served in	Triangular Plate	Round Plate
My Rating	Very Nice ****	Quite Nice ***

How’s that? LOL!

We said we are here for the drinks only, right? Well, we lied.

We ended up ordering a hot pot. We just could not resist getting a hot pot because almost every table had one. The smell was killing us.

So we ordered the Ginseng Chicken Hot Pot. Like the drinks, they came back and told us sorry … they ran out of that too! So we changed the order to Cheese Seafood Hot Pot with Sliced Pork. This one is $8.95.

We never tried this before. We ordered this because of the novelty. Generally Chinese food does not include cheese or milk. The soup is milk and it has a distinct cheesy flavour. It was kind of strange drinking the soup because milk-cheese soup is a strange combination to our brain.

Nanzaro hates it. So it ended up that Suanne and I had to finish this off even though we were already full.

The bill came up to $27 before tips. The food is the same between Pearl Castle on Sexsmith and this Pearl Castle in Richmond Centre. This place is a lot more busier. I hope they sort out the issue of running out of items on their menu.