Saturday, June 19, 2004

I need fried rice

Many of you know of my unhealty addiction to TC Garden's BBQ pork fried rice. That's the problem with Redmond -- none such exists.

It's weird. I've been to a Thai Ginger and a Golden Chopsticks. Both are restaurants you immediately recognize as not Thai nor Chinese. They both have very hip decorations, with cool stylish lights and tables. The walls are dotted with some highly fetishized, highly stylized Asian -- or, more exactly, "oriental" -- items like a big golden Chinese character, fans, a dragon, etc. This is not Thai or Chinese -- this is what Americans perceive as Thai or Chinese. And it's disgusting.

As is the food. My $8 fried rice that I ordered from both places are twice as expensive and half as good as that from TC Garden. The Thai place is better, but who the hell puts broccoli in fried rice? The chinese place was just abysmal with dry pork and too much salt. Bleh.

I need a good, cheap, authentic chinese restaurant. For those of you not in the know, here's how you can tell:

Americanized Chinese RestaurantAuthentic Chinese Restaurant
  • has cool stylish lights hanging from the ceiling
  • has flickering fluorescent lights about to fall off the ceiling
  • has stylish furniture that you can buy from IKEA
  • has broken tables that dance to your eating rhythm
  • clean, pleasant tabletops
  • why do you think they give you napkins?
  • has orange chicken as top menu item
  • laughs at you when you order orange chicken
  • white waitress
  • what waitress?
  • expensive as hell
  • slightly cheaper than hell
  • tastes like wood
  • tastes like properly spiced wood


God how I long for a real chinese restaurant! I miss California.

1 comments: (Post a Comment)

Unknown said...

... I just heard of a "pretty good" place next to some Safeway... Mayhaps I will try it out.