Hot & Sour Soup - Din Tai Fung

Hot & Sour Soup (Small) $6.00 + Tax

I always love a good bowl of hot & sour soup. But the hot & sour soup at this restaurant was just too bland for me.  It was lacking both the flavor and the kick that I expected. The fact that it looked like it could be a tasty bowl of good hot & soup soup made it even more disappointing.  I also didn't like the pork strips in there because a few strips tasted stinky (gamy).  I love pork but I don't like gamy meat.  Maybe it's just how animals are raised these days?  I feel that as years go by, I'm experiencing more and more stinky meat, whether they are chicken, pork or beef.  There is this hint of game and stink in a lot of meats that I tasted in recent years, that I never had realized when I was growing up.  I remember the meat tasted so good when I was a kid,  when I only had gamy meat only in the extremely rare occasions when we unfortunately stumbled upon a bad restaurant that cooked with the cheap old frozen meat...   This is how I knew when meat smelled and tasted off.  But in recent years, what used to be an extremely rare occasion when I was a kid, is almost normal since it happens in so many restaurants, and in so many home-cooked dinners made by my friends and family.  Since I don't cook, I'm not really sure if it's just the particular mass-market grade of meat in the grocery stores.