At The Restaurant

Diary 3 Minutes

Image by LEEROY Agency from Pixabay

I really don’t know if I should say “different foods” or plain old “different food”. I have a certain grasp of “sounding right”, like a proficient non-native speaker, but my understanding has never reached the sphere of plurals. This means I’m forever plagued with questions like “should I add an ‘s’ to information, consideration, twin, couple and a pile of other words with uncertain plural status. After trying hard to learn the method of this linguistic madness but not getting much result, I know I should just give up but for some reason I haven’t completely given up yet.

I don’t know if this should be called cultural differences or regional differences or personal differences. Remember one of the episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, in which Larry’s wife Cheryl proposed that they went to a particular restaurant for dinner. Larry agreed to it. Then Cheryl added that she would like to stop at a bar to have a drink first before heading to the restaurant. To this, Larry couldn’t agree. “Why can’t we just have our drinks at the restaurant? Why do we have to have drinks and food at two different places?” Larry asked. Cheryl explained that she enjoyed the drinking atmosphere at a bar, but Larry still couldn’t understand and didn’t want to go. I guess Larry’s inflexibility eventually led to their divorce in this TV series.

Anyway, I just want to say that I have always thought that hopping from one place to another to get the most desirable food item (or drinks) from each place is a common practice. For example, we can have a meal in our local Wonder Seafood restaurant, after which we can go to a bakery shop to get egg custards, or slices of chestnut cake, or rice cakes. However, it is impossible to sit down there to enjoy them. So we end up going to Starbucks or Panera Bread where we can have two cups of coffee to accompany the dessert we bring with us. Panera Bread has really good Bear Claws, which are as delicious as any of the Asian sweets.

Once me and my friends ran into trouble. It was long time ago. It was a holiday but I forgot what kind of holiday it was. And you know there are very few good Asian restaurants in central New Jersey despite the sizable Asian population. I think this is due to the fact that a good restaurant will always choose New York City as the most desirable location for their business. Consequently there are a concentration of good restaurants there and very few good ones in here. Wonder Seafood is one of the very few good ones in the vicinity. So for that particular holiday, me and two friends went to Wonder Seafood for dim sum, but there was a big line of people waiting to get in. The line was so long that you had to stand in the parking lot to wait. Eventually the waiters started to pass out numbers so that one can hold onto the number and wait in one’s car. The wait time for us was about one hour. My friends and I thought instead of waiting, we can just go to another restaurant to share an appetizer or two first before coming back. There was a new Asian restaurant opening up several blocks away. So we went there. Guess what? When the waiter in the new restaurant realized that we were only going to order and share one or two appetizers, he immediately asked us to leave, which was very rude. I think we were being too honest that we told the waiter that we were waiting to get in Wonder Seafood and so we were only going to order one or two appetizers in this new restaurant. The waiter was very likely hurt by our honesty. We were a little humiliated and we asked to see the waiter’s boss, but the waiter said the boss was not there and he was in charge. We argued that we wanted to order the appetizer as takeout, but he told us appetizers were not in the takeout menu. So we left, but before leaving the premise, me and my friend shouted at the waiter, who was trailing behind us to make sure we stepped out. “How can you treat us this way? We will tell everybody not to come to eat here.” And my other friend grabbed a handful of fortune cookies and several napkins from the corner of the front desk.

Published by haoyando

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21 thoughts on “At The Restaurant”

  1. It almost sounds like a wild night in Korea, going from one establishment to the next. I can’t see why the waiter was rude to you about the appetizers, though. Maybe he wouldn’t get as big of a tip but business is still business. Besides, I can imagine you or your friends going back there if the food was good (and the waiter was not so rude).

    Sometimes I go to British style pubs and order the appetizers as well and no one pays any mind. Funny enough, one waitress even recognizes me whenever I stopped by.

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    1. You must have made an impression on the waitress, who would recognize you and talk with you. And yes, we know all the waiters and waitresses in the Asian restaurants around here. And I have to say sometimes people can get rude. We all need more humor and skills as social lubricants.

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      1. I agree, humor is needed. In my case, I think the reason why I made an impression is because I am the only Indian people see there. I never order alcohol there, since I am on my way to work, and I usually sit at a table by myself reading a book . . . which is something I like doing before heading off to work.

        So I make an unusual customer haha.

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        1. That’s great–to read a book in a place like that. You make a very good impression indeed. I have to say I never dare to go to a restaurant or a diner or any eatery alone since the Asian community and Asian restaurant people here are rather conservative. They don’t like to see a woman eating alone. LOL. They never change even if the world around them is changing. I mean changing in a good way.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Yeah I have noticed that. I like to eat or even drink alone to collect my thoughts. I did a fair amount of that in Korea and some people were almost flabbergasted. I would get men asking me, “Why are you drinking alone!?” To which I say, “Because I want to.” And their reply is “NOOO!!!! That’s not right!!”

          Some things definitely need to change.

          Liked by 1 person

        3. Oh, that’s exactly the same reaction you will find in the Asian restaurant around here. The waiters and waitresses will eye you weirdly if you go in there alone. And if you are a woman, that’s even worse. They don’t say anything, but you can feel the negative vibe as if they are grabbing your ear, and shouting into it, “you should be ashamed of yourself to come here alone.”

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        4. Even in America? It almost reminds me of the movie “Bend it like Beckham” in which stars an Indian girl living like a normal British teenager while clashing with her traditional Sikh family and community. It’s not a fun thing at all.

          Liked by 1 person

        5. Yes, even in New Jersey. I’ve encountered it several times. I should write a post about this. Young women nowadays are going to the restaurant alone–more often than women of previous generations–and .. I’ve seen it several times. Under the veneer of social etiquette, there are so much contempt unexpressed by those waiters and waitresses… The problem is that I don’t know how to write this story to make it interesting and readable. It is very subtle. It is almost like narcissism expressed in a socially appropriate way but with a lot of bitterness and antagonism hidden underneath.

          Liked by 1 person

        6. That is a good question. Perhaps using an allegory can help? I am thinking of writer Lu Xun and how he uses satire and allegory to poke holes at traditional Chinese culture.

          There are many options to explore.

          Like

  2. I think Larry’s inflexibility eventually led to his divorce in real life too, lol. I’ve always thought it was normal too because different places have better options sometimes for different things. I’ve often just had appetisers or drinks at once place and the main meal elsewhere and dessert at yet another place. As you know, I had a similar experience and I think waiters/waitresses asking someone to leave for that is a great way to lose customers even in the future. People don’t realise how important customer service is, especially these days with the inflation. You should just be happy to have good, paying customers no matter what they order.

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    1. Wow, really? You are right. I can imagine that. Larry can be a person who’s not easy to live with. LOL. I totally agree with you. I think one can eat several things, each in a different restaurant, if one chooses it. Since I watch food vlog all the time, these food vloggers would go from one place to another, sometimes five or six places within a short period of time. It’s all for the enjoyment of it.

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      1. Yes, Larry doesn’t seem like an easy person to be around lol. I love Curb but I would probably get annoyed if I ever met him in person.
        Yes, I see that in food vlogs too and always see them visit multiple places.

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  5. There are a lot of things in this that are strange to me, but I don’t get out much and we don’t do drinks. I don’t get the idea of going to a different restaurant for appetizers, I don’t get the restaurant not wanting to serve the appetizers, either. As to plurals, I can understand what you mean even if it sometimes might be off a little bit.

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    1. Yes, I think we shouldn’t have gone to another restaurant for appetizers. However we wanted to take a look at the new restaurant, but we generally know that most of the Asian restaurants in the area are not that good, at least not in the same standard as the Wonder Seafood. Now looking back, we probably shouldn’t have gone, but that’s the thing with group dynamics. When you are in a group, you often go with the flow or whatever suggestions somebody comes up.

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