BACK STORY: It's a cold, rainy Sunday, and I was looking for a restaurant that has wifi and accepts my American credit card, and maybe even indoor plumbing and heating as an added bonus.
Luckily I stumbled across this place before getting to Balzac Coffee.
So I sat in the lower seating area, and the waitress hovered at the top of the stairs the whole time just staring at me.
I ordered 2 appetizers, then she came back a second later to ask if I wanted to order any main entree. But where are my apps??
So later my two apps arrive with a bizarre "submissive" attitude from the waitress. Excuse me?! I like to eat food, I'm not here to feed into whatever post-colonialist psychological dungeon you choose to subscribe to!!! See a psychiatrist and keep me out of this!
Back to the apps. One of them is steamed chicken dumplings. STEAMED. CHICKEN. DUMPLINGS. They were raw. Who the fuck steams raw chicken wrapped in dough?! Brown it then add it to the wrapper and steam it. Also, the dumplings were sitting bare in a wooden steamer. The steamer obviously was not sanitized properly between uses because it had a unique moldy smell that stuck to the dumplings even when I put them on a plate.
Maybe I give these fools too much credit, because rather than finish my dumplings, I ended up ordering 3 desserts: battered fried bananas, hot sesame balls filled with red bean paste, and taro mochi sitting in a puddle of molasses.
By this point, I'm just flabbergasted.... the best part was the orange slices used as a garnish. Seriously, why.... why..... did they decorate the plate with dark molasses? It makes no sense, and the flavor overpowered the delicate flavor of the taro mochi.
Also the best part of mochi is the texture: molasses on the underside of my taro mochi was such a disappointment, I might as well have dumped a jar of molasses on grandma's pillowcase and slept on it.
I was so upset, I only ate one garnish.
Maybe I was better off at Balzac coffee after all.... read more