Shoryu opened last week on a freezing cold day in Oxford. They had the bright and cheerful idea of offering a free bowl of ramen to the first 112 people through the door. Stupid enigmatic mystical number. As committed tasters of ramen across the civilized universe -- regulars at the Mitsuwa foodcourt in Costa Mesa, Ippudo in Berkeley, and Yama, Ootoya and Sunrise in New York -- wife and I had elected to go there anyway at some point, and since we happened to be in Oxford on the opening day we thought we'd go and try and get the free ramen.
Who don't like free things, after all, specially when it's ramen.
We were queueing in the bitter cold, we got there twenty minutes before they were due to open, and it looked close but possible. People in the queue ahead were counting heads trying to work out whether they'd qualify for the free ramen. The characters in front of us reckoned they were at the ninety eighth point. So we stuck it out.
This precise point is where Shoryu BITCHED IT UP ROYALLY and caused a PR scandal.
We stood there and as the minutes passed observed several people cut into the queue at different nodes. All these genial people letting their friends in. "Dude! You made it! Get in front of me!" "Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Hop in!" "Great to see you! By the way VUCK THOSE PEOPLE BEHIND US INCIDENTALLY THEY ARE NON-HUMAN SCUM NOT REALLY REAL PEOPLE ANYWAY." They dehumanized us. They ghettoized us without a thought. Don't these people consider the ramifications of their actions? Pro-slavery scum! People kept cutting in and people behind them kept leaving the queue to recount heads and see if they still qualified for the free ramen. People were becoming discouraged. People were becoming actively sad and angry. People were losing enthusiasm and losing their feelings of generosity towards their fellow man and also towards the ramen restaurant called SHORYU.
It became confusing, the counting of the heads. We became fatalistic. The punchline, as you might have guessed, since Trump is in the White House and life is encrusted with unfairnesses, is: we got to the door and the people directly in front of us were given the last ticket. Still the French maitre d' tried to usher us into a crammed corner. We asked, "Well, do we get the free ramen or not?" and almost as an afterthought he said "...Nnnnnnnnnnnnooo... not exactly... not really... no."
I exploded. "There's been people cutting in for the last twenty minutes. You should have handled this better. You should have given numbered tickets out to people as they queued in good faith, and you should have given people fair warning when they weren't going to qualify. You should be ashamed. What you did isn't right. You let in evil. You're like the waiter in La Nausee. You won with murder. YOU VOTED FOR TRUMP!"
I left that place and addressed the people still queueing, like a good radical. I said, "Free soup's off and it ain't coming back!"
You can call us cheapskates if you like and say we brought it on ourselves by being skinflints, and "perhaps we probably did," but I also maintain that SHORYU bungled it badly and treated their potential patrons poorly, and now we have irrationally taken against Shoryu and their food and it would be a gross betrayal of our characters and our integrity not to mention our immortal souls to ever eat there. That is that, we'll never go there. We have withdrawn the one thing we still have, our discernment as customers. "The one thing we have is our freedom to die."
We went upstairs to PHO instead.
Shoryu stands with queue cutters -- queue holders -- seat holders -- throat cutters -- Trump voters.
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