Vely tastely, sil!

Sunday night. We didn’t feel like cooking so we went out looking for a cosy restaurant in which our appetite could be satisfied in a not too expensive way. We ended up at the doorstep of restaurant Denny’s, of which you could compare the meals to a Dutch motorway restaurant. However, I was not really in the mood for steak and fries, so we extended our search a bit further.

Across the street there was a restaurant called “Restaurant Oriental”. It looked like they served a Chinese buffet. We tried to extract from a Chinese waiter what exactly the buffet consisted of and how much money it would cost us. We couldn’t understand a word he was saying, his English really was very very poor. The only thing we learnt was that it would cost about NZ$ 19 each.

The restaurant looked everything but cosy, more like a workplace cafeteria. But oh well, it did smell nice and an appetite for Chinese buffet started to grow. In the restaurant itself there were heaps of Chinese people enjoying a meal, so this had to be something good. Emma wasn’t too sure, but I found it rather interesting to eat where the Chinese themselves eat, so we sat down and ordered buffet for two.

The waiter asked us how we wanted our “won”. Our what? The… eeer… the... the “won”. Oh… right. It soon became clear to us that there was some kind of communication problem arising. The waiter saw the problem too so he dragged an eating Chinese man away from his dinner table to translate for us. The English of the other man wasn’t that good either, but he did manage to tell us that a pan would be put on the table in which we could prepare our own food. He asked us which sauce we wanted, Normal or Chili. He suggested that we would take the normal sauce, because the Chili would be much too hot for us. I wondered why it wouldn’t be possible to place two bottles with sauce on the table so I asked him “both?” Yes, that would be possible too. Good.

Well, our won came and it wasn’t exactly what I had expected. It turned out not to be a Wok. It was a filthy small gas burner with a pan on top. The pan was split into two sides. On one side there was milky water (Normal), on the other side there was red fatty water (Chili). Rigggghhhhtttt…. When we walked over to the counter to get our raw food, we weren’t exactly thrilled by what we saw. Or maybe we were. Everything you would consider butchery waste was neatly put into little containers. How about a piece of lung? Or little rubber balls that tasted like fish? Luckily there was something we did like somewhat: a bowl with deep fried chicken wings. Our evening out had become KFC-night with budget cola. Pretty interesting indeed, but not very funny or tasty. Now you know what Emma has to put up with just by being my wife. Oh well… never a dull moment ;-)

So what did we learn today: if a restaurant is filled with Chinese people only, run away as fast as you can !