Deep Fried Americana

While out and about running our errands today, Mike and I decided to do lunch at a chinese buffet restaurant, one of our favourite places to go. Great food, all you can eat, and the sort of atmosphere that I like: unobtrusive. The staff are attentive, but not over bearingly so. They don't try to strike up a conversation with you, but still manage to remain polite. I don't think you can fully appreciate this sort of rare behaviour unless you enjoy maintaining as little contact with people as possible like I do. Basically, when I want to eat, I want to eat, I don't want to spend five minutes or so listening to a server try to chat me up and act like taking my order is the single most life-fulfilling task he has or will ever accomplish. I know better than that, and resent this sort of false camaraderie. Just take my damned order and leave me alone. And for christ sake, stop hovering off to the side, waiting until my mouth is full to ask me questions.

Anyway, as I was saying, this place is not at all like that. The staff are very polite in that low-spoken oriental way that I find so appealing, but they don't try to pretend they're your new best friend. If your glass is empty, they bring you a new drink. When your plate is empty, they take it away while you're up at the tables. It's great. The only downside is the fact that the place is rather popular. We combat this by avoiding the place on the weekends. Week days can also be busy, particularly around noon, but this was 4:30pm, so we figured we'd be safe.

Sadly, it only takes one group of people to ruin a meal if they try hard enough. And such a family was in place today.

We tried to not notice them at first, but soon realized that this was an impossible task. Really, trying to not notice them would be like pretending to ignore a rabid monkey gnawing on your eyeball. They were loud, obnoxious, and the mother figure appeared to be wearing a dead cheetah on her head, and not well at that. It's difficult to focus on your food when every time she moved her head, you feel compelled to duck under the table and look as unlike a Thompson's gazelle as possible.

Her son/son's friend/boyfriend (who can really tell these days?), looking mightily attractive with his baggy pants that only barely covered his ass and and backwards ball cap, was apparently upset because the buffet table was lacking in fried shrimp. Truly, a chinese delicacy, I can see where one would expect fried shrimp to be a staple there, but apparently the silly restaurant didn't see it that way. (Where the Chinese get off saying what should or should not be a chinese delicacy anyway is beyond me.) So he chose to comment to the rest of his table about the lack of fried shrimp.

Loudly.

The waitress came over to ask, in admittedly heavily-accented and slightly broken but clearly understandable english, if there was a problem. The guy asked HER if they had any fried shrimp, despite the fact that it's pretty clear the buffet was devoid of anything deep-fried of the mollusk variety. She confirmed that there were no fried shrimp. When she had left (and by "left" I mean "taken 10 steps from the table"), the family burst into laughter, and while I couldn't hear the exact words being used, it was pretty clear that they were making fun of the waitress. What's more, the waitress could also tell.

This was so typically American that I really shouldn't even be surprised by it anymore. They seek the wrong things in the wrong places, and then mock those who are only trying to do their job. So what if the girl's accent was thick? At least she was intelligent enough to be bilingual. These people had only a basic grasp of their own native tongue. I think the guy best epitomized himself when he was offered a stir-fried shrimp by Cheetah Woman and he responded (loudly, of course) with "Naw, that ain't crunchy."

On reflection, I probably should've said something, but I'm more an observer and commentator on life around me, I don't like to interract with it unless I have to. We did, however, leave her a nice tip and thanked her, so hopefully that'll make her day a tiny bit better. If nothing else, perhaps the family in question will seek crunchy seafood elsewhere in the future.