:: Iron chef ::

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

There's a delicious, nondescript Chinese "Restaurant and Bakery" (heavy on the restaurant and light on the bakery) half a block from my office. It's plucked straight out of Chinatown, with ducks hanging in the window, dirt cheap lunchtime offerings (e.g. $3.75 for three ample dishes and rice), an almost entirely Chinese patron base, and chaotic service. You are alerted to your turn for ordering by a "HELLO" that is intoned somewhere between alarm and accusation. I believe it wound up in midtown through a diasporic wrong turn.

The 20 or so tins behind the shoulder-high glass vary in the difficulty of identifying their contents. The bok choi, tofu, and whole-fried shrimp are unmistakable. Some dishes are ambiguous in appearance, even enigmatic. This latter group can further be divided into dishes that one can identify upon eating (enlisting the senses of taste and smell from one's diagnostic arsenal), and those that obstinately refuse categorization. I'm pretty sure I ate some part of an intestinal tract once, though the animal whence it came will never be known.

As would be expected, the threshold for being fazed by one's food rises a bit when eating there on a constant basis. So today when I scooped a forkful of rice and a mystery vegetable into my mouth I thought nothing of the red sauce residue on the plastic afterwards. Communal serving tongs and ladles are used (note to vegans, vegetarians, picky eaters, and those with food allergies: stay away) and often some cross-pollination will leave a faint trace of pork in cabbage or a pea in some duck. Only when the normally pristine white rice at the bottom exhibited the same behavior did I realize that the whole time I'd been bleeding all over my lunch.

Posted by morland @ 03:20 PM

:: Comments ::

Ahh. I miss that place. It used to cost $3 and thus my collegue's nickname for it: $3 chinese

the best part is that its definitely enough for 2 lunches worth

you just dont get bargains like that in my current neighborhood.

Posted by: cristina on September 14, 2005 07:05 PM

His grandma? Gross!

Posted by: Narm! on September 15, 2005 11:47 AM

Honestly though, they have really good pork sticky buns for breakfast. I think that's where the "bakery" part comes into play.

And in my office, that place is like the local coffee shop. All the girls go there. Now, doesn't that make you want to be in fashion production? No. Shei shei.

Posted by: Joey Brooks on September 16, 2005 01:21 PM

um, no photo? total letdown.

Posted by: a superhero by night on September 19, 2005 12:07 AM

bleeding gums = michael "scurvy" orland

Posted by: dr. glasses on January 23, 2006 11:57 AM

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