Stick & Steam — Restaurant in Millbrae

A restaurant that tries to excel at everything often excels at nothing.

Such is the situation with Stick & Steam. If you look at their menu, they offer everything from dim sum to classic Chinese food to bubble tea to skewers and even sea bass. It's difficult to imagine that they have a specialized chef for each of these cuisines stuffed into their tiny kitchen. In addition, their service was not only slow, but inaccurate. Even though I was first in line, I still ended up waiting around 40 minutes to get seated. While waiting, I observed that they had gotten multiple tables' orders incorrect. I don't know if they were understaffed or if their staff was just disorganized. Regardless, watching them felt like watching the Houston Rockets play the San Antonio Spurs in 2017. Unforced error after unforced error.

I would say this place has good potential if they simplified their menu, focused on a cuisine, and streamlined...

We got yolk fries and I got several items but forgot to take pictures (I also forgot exact names, sorry):

Sampler dumplings Cheesy baked chicken and rice Green beans Brown sugar boba

The brown sugar milk tea was made with some kind of special jelly that wasn’t at all tapioca balls. The texture was more like a semi-firm, uniform jelly- and it was delicious!! I personally dislike the texture of tapioca balls- most places make them taste too sticky or undercook them and they have a grainy taste. These jellies were delicious! They add some kind of graham cracker crumble on top too- which is nice.

Cheesy baked chicken and rice was a little heavy, and I probably should have gotten something lighter.

Sampler dumplings were delicious, but I was hungry and ate them too fast, so I don’t really remember the taste.

Green beans were cooked well- crunchy and fresh- with some delicious onions...

I really want to like this place but it's a letdown unfortunately. This place attracted its customers (including me) because it's rumored to be associated with the owner of Koi Palace. The place has all the ingredients of a good place if you don't want to wait in lines for some dim sum or a quick bite and the food looks great. However the biggest missing piece is the taste. For example the Har Gow (shrimp dumplings) are huge but not only the skins break apart easily (not good) but that the shrimps are not fully cooked. Maybe because of the undercooked shrimp flavors do not permeate within the Har Gow when you bite into it. The Hainan chicken is not very tender and the pork belly is over cooked so not as juicy as it could be. Overall, it's missing the flavor part of a...