A Chinese restaurant menu that came with the mail has been sitting at the “forgotten corner” on my desk for a week or two. Suddenly, a thought came to me. “It can't be,” I said to myself. To confirm my suspicion, I opened it and checked its location on the map printed on the cover. Well, it is.
* * * * * * *
It all started from a couple of years ago. My brother saw a new Chinese buffet & dim-sum ad on a local Chinese newspaper. It was in my town, so my brother called me to check it out. I didn't know where it was exactly, but after we found the place, I realized it was actually right across from a local town library I frequented. From the look of it, it seemed like the place used to be a regular “American" restaurant--like those chained restaurants, Friendly's or Denny's, which means the new owner didn't bother to redecorate the place, and its facade simply looked wrong.
Anyway, we were there. What else could we do? So we walked to the entrance, but we had to stop right there because the whole place was packed--so packed that it reminded me a lot of an overcrowded student cafeteria, or a prison one, inside which everybody gathered around a huge metal pot of rice congee. The all-white walls didn't help much either. The whole setting simply looked so plain and it didn't help my appetite one bit. My brother walked to the food trays, took a look, came back out and said he wasn't impressed.
* * * * * * *
Two or three weeks ago, a friend called us and said he was bringing his wife and relatives to a Chinese buffet & dim-sum restaurant near us. My roommate answered the phone. After he finished the call, he told me our friend saw the restaurant's ad on a Chinese newspaper, and he then told me the address and figured I'm Chinese so I must know the place. Wrong! Anyway, they came, picked us up, and we were on our way to the “new” restaurant. When we got there, my friend's wife said, “this place looks like a take-out restaurant!” “Well, why don't you go in and take a quick look,” her husband said to her.
By now, I already recognized this place, so I tried to save us some trouble and told her, “well, I know this place. My brother and I were here before and it's horrible. Really, you don't have to go.”
“Was the food that bad?” my friend said.
“Well, I don't know, because I didn't go in.”
“Then how do you know it's horrible?”
“Well, it's the look. It looks horrible.”
“But it doesn't mean the food is bad, right?”
“Yeah, you're right. I guess you can take a look and see if you like it,” so finally I caved in.
Then it's decided that he and my roommate would go in and take a look at the food. At the same time his wife and I were discussing other options in case the food was bad. Our conclusions weren't very good because other restaurants we could think of were far away. (Their relatives were from Taiwan and weren't very used to local food, so local "American" restaurants weren't an option.)
A few moments later, they came out. My friend walked to our car, leaned in, and said, “well, the food is just about the same as the one we often go to.” He meant a Chinese buffet restaurant up north. I knew that place too. Yeah, their food was okay, limited selections, but at least they had a better decors--in other words, that one up north looked more like a Chinese restaurant.
The verdict was in and his relatives okayed it, so we all walked in.
Well, I must say, their food WAS okay, not as bad as I previously thought. Their dim-sum wasn't very impressive, but definitely not the worst. If I'm to give ratings, I'd say it's “edible”--“don't go there” if you just came from Taiwan, and “enjoy yourself” if you've been in the US over 4 years and anything labeled with "Chinese" automatically means “it should taste okay” to you.
* * * * * * *
I opened the menu lying on my desk, took a look, and already I found one typo and one grammatical mistake:
Lunch, Dinner Buffet
10% OFF
Expires: Oct, 30/2006
Not Inculded Dim Sum Buffet
Will I go there again? Maybe. After all, I've been in the US over 10 years!
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