“You’re so dodgy” my friend said to me when I told her how I’d once jumped the queue to get into the Marigold in Sydney’s Chinatown. “If you go up the escalator, there’s a goods lift which takes you to the kitchen area, and you just walk through”, I told her.

We were on the verge of taking it, as we waited for close to an hour to get in for our 10 am booking. There was some kind of weird arrangement where you joined the queue if you’d made a phone booking but could go straight to the top of the queue if you’d made an online booking. WTF

The lengthy queue was no doubt a response to the recent news Marigold was closing only a few weeks short of their fortieth anniversary.

A former colleague and I had recently had lunch there, celebrating in a similar way, but we had gone to the top of the queue because he regularly booked larger functions there. You can understand my frustration of having to wait?

After an hour of waiting, we were close to the end of our patience. Only a few metres from entering, the queue stopped, showed no signs of moving, and we started to see online bookings enter ahead of us. 

I went upstairs and checked out the goods elevator.

But finally, we decided it made more sense to look elsewhere. I walked across the road, got a table immediately at Emperor’s Garden. The only delay was from the people in front of us who didn’t know how to use the check-in. Seriously? After eighteen months they still couldn’t tell the difference between using the app and taking a photograph!?!?!

My friends joined me shortly afterwards and within minutes we were seated and eating.

My tip for Sydneysiders? There are more places for yum cha than Marigold.