O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Today, I mourned the loss of a brother. Don’t worry, no one died. Unless, of course, you consider my spirit. Can you even anthropomorphize a spirit? Anyway, these are hardly culinary questions that need answering. Although at times, food can do a good job of putting our hearts at ease.

Some days, I get really down on myself. Some days, I get really hungry. And some days, I remember that if I don’t eat, I can get really down on myself. Today was starting to be one of those days. Remembering the terrible news of my dear brother’s decision to move out of town and in with the love of his life made me desperate to fill the emptiness that hung where my own heart once was. Yes, dear listeners, even one thousand crescent kicks under the still moon the night before weren’t nearly enough to quell the feeling that I had been left alone, platonically sojourned in a city where a close comrade and I had drank tea, learned kung fu, and eaten copious amounts of bad Chinese food. Those were my salad days.

And if I can aggrandize this story of brotherhood any further I will mention that I intended to eat my pain away with the worst, most dangerous Chinese-Canadian food I could find. Fortunately for me, a pang of recollection prevented me from ordering the stuff I know sits so heavily in my stomach and not so happily in my heart. And like that, I was called, as if by the Buddha himself, to a place I had been years before, where my dear brother once tried vegetarianism, and your dear narrator came to be comforted by him, all while stuck in an abyss of graduate work. It was then, after some tea and pickled cabbage when I realized that no matter what the world was like at least there was food; and that no matter how hard things may be to take, when everything’s all said and done, the world is still there. And, if we’re lucky enough, the places we go to eat are still there too, offering sanctuary like temples in some kung fu flick.

I won’t keep you in anymore suspense; I’m speaking pretty tongue in cheek at this point anyway. Just let me say this, everything I write is true and comes from what little heart I have left. Tenterhooks, my friends, tenterhooks.

If you’re feeling a little bit of spiritual abandon, or looking, like I did today, for some connection to a more nostalgic past, it might suit your poor spirit to visit Lotus Tea House, a vegetarian restaurant with an already stellar following. It has a quaint townhouse location and, of all things, a retrofitted Buddhist temple, as anachronistic as that sounds. Why bore you with any other trivialities? What with the urbaneness of wicker chairs and somewhat unaccommodating wooden tables (if you’re a group of four), pacifying classical music, creaky wooden floors, salmon coloured, stucco walls, and botany pictures- I must be heartbroken, because I am being far too harsh in this instance.

What makes the Lotus Tea House matchless in quality is the knowledge it offers the masses; shelves where diners can read books about the Buddha, and even donate any Buddhist teachings themselves if they so choose. Upstairs there’s an empty room with a lone Buddha statue where you can even bow three times, if YOU so choose. And of course, there’s its fait accompli: its originally brewed teas. Pots that run the price of, at most, 4.95. Well worth it, if not for the novelty of having a tea that doesn’t steep dried goods, but boils everything together fresh. So I am told, so I have seen. I’ve never looked in the kitchen though. But, the proof in this case is in the pot, because there are instances of whole oranges, mashed up almonds, even apples left in clear glass pots. Of course, there are dried leaf teas if the heart so chooses. I myself am a staunch disqualifier of tea almost anywhere, my old master teaching my dear brother and I about tea when we were young kung fu adherents (he never believed in drinking cold water, only boiling oolongs), so I like to push my snobbery onto the world. Anyway, the tea certainly is unique, and warrants mindful drinking, the almond tea, for example, will gelatinize if you let it sit long enough.

I was intrigued by the icy cold fruit tea: iced tea I assumed to be rhetorically done up on the menu and underwhelmed by in person. I was wrong. It was the best iced tea I’ve ever had in town. It had pieces of fruit, apples, oranges, pineapple, elevating the Ceylon brew to something ambrosial (yeah, I’ve used the word before; but this time, I mean it). And it wasn’t just put there to humour an aesthetic seeking drinker. The lemon undertone I’d usually expect was replaced by an awesome orange citric sweetness, a syrupy pineapple pungency, mixed so well that the beverage had its own frothy head! Never have I come across anything like it.

Healthy Soy Bean was the next item to order; boiled soy bean with a dash of sea salt. In my mind I envisioned it as a block of mere tofu smothered in salt, something I hoped for, my Philippine grandmother lovingly feeding it to me for breakfast in my youth. Alas, I was met with a plate of Edamame beans, that dull, popular Japanese appetizer. Nutty, salty, clean. I can’t complain more than that.

My entree was an exciting array of cranberries, cashew nuts, tofu and vegetable stir-fry, paired with a simple soup and bowl of bean sprouts with a simple spicy, savoury sauce. The soup itself was a humble thing. Its broth, a quiet familiar vegetable flavor, with the odd tomato skin floating about, something I have come to know in the culinary world as always out of place.

I was underwhelmed by my stir-fry. A serving set around a dome of light and aromatically nutty rice, I was disappointed by what I saw in front of me. There was nothing wrong with the portion, there was a substantial amount of food, but I couldn’t hold truck with the lack of cranberries and cashews. I wonder why so many places do this? Highlight dishes with unique ingredient ideas and then give dishes a sparse sprinkling. The combination of sweet cranberries and savoury cashews would have given perfect balance to the already salty and starchy nut sauce that coated the stir-fry. I thought that maybe Lotus Tea House could have been the prodigal son that escaped the banality of Chinese food, but the features of the dish were absolutely overwhelmed with so much traditional flavor. I threw my puritan caution to the wind. I was tired, I was heartbroken, I mashed my rice with my stir-fry, I didn’t care to keep it separate, I turned it to mush, I ate furiously, the waiters couldn’t stop staring. I didn’t care. I blamed it on those one thousand crescent kicks, I blamed it on my broken heart, I was still trying desperately to fill a void. Was it my lost brother I was crying over? Or my food? I didn’t even know anymore.

The Lotus Teahouse

79 Regina St. North

Waterloo, Ont. N2J 3A7

Monday: 11:00 am – 3 pm

Tuesday to Thursday: 11 am – 7 pm

Friday & Saturday 11 am – 8 pm

Sunday Closed

CASH, VISA, OR DEBIT.

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Love Trial

*I feel obligated to tell you all that this fabulous place no longer exists.*

This city needs more places like Lovenest. Shoot, if you ask me, the name even manifests exactly what the world should be: one big, old, giant love nest. With good food. Aw, yes, just thinking about it warms the cockles of my heart; and thinking about it still warms the cockles –if there are cockles there- of my stomach.

Now, I must be honest, dear readers, I’m an amateur when it comes to the food offered at Lovenest: Ethiopian and East African. Heck, I can’t even call myself an amateur, because even amateurs have some sort of casual participation. I’ve only ever heard about this kind of cuisine from others who have eaten it in their lives. If anything, I was merely a newcomer into the world of Ethiopian cuisine. I had read the theory beforehand, and took two dear, but equally new colts along for yet another expedition in the field of gastronomic anthropology.

It was an overwhelming undertaking entering a room thick with foggy incense, deep red walls, dim lighting, and straw tables we had never before seen. Heck, I even confused a table with coffee for a shrine of some sort. Don’t worry; I am ashamed of myself. But that was as extraneous as the place got; it had tables that seated multiple diners, a bar where one could pay and order a drink, and the typical foreign tapestries that always play to the illusion of the authenticity of the places we eat in. Themes, I tells ya. There was even a flat screen television hung on the wall tuned into not the news, not the weather, but that ever so lovable bald boy, Caillou. Oh, you don’t know? Well, maybe you should be a little more like your juvenile narrator.

Greeted assuredly, we were taken to a table that accommodated all three of us (appetites included) and were pointed to the simple menus that sat under the glass. For both lunch and dinner we were given the option of nine manageable items. It was, as far as I was concerned, paradise. Now, if I may allude to my opening statement, more places should be like Lovenest. Menus today, I tells ya, they’re too complicated, too overbearing, too full of too many choices; perhaps a symptom of the free market? We only have one stomach after all, and though stomachs may get hungry many-a-time in our lives, we never visit a place multiple times in attempt to try every item on the menu, but instead go back for favourites, thus becoming regulars. Right? Well, at Lovenest, you can have it all. Regularity and menu mastery. A characteristic of the Ethiopian restaurant, I am told, is the small menu. That, and the ritual of eating without cutlery, a sourdough flatbread resembling a thicker more voluptuous crepe taking its place.

My company and I ordered our respective dishes, vegetarian for a third of us, and whatever else had meat in it for the rest. In retrospect, the menu being the size that it was, offered a substantial choice for vegetarians and was affordable. The most expensive plate, a full vegetarian meal, was 15.99 and the least a mere ten dollars.

We were dazzled when our meals arrived: chopped meats, salads, and vegetarian purees decorated atop capacious pieces of the flat, acidic, sour dough bread, with even more of said bread on separate plates and rolled into convenient bales. The bigger the bale, the bigger the friendship I’m told.

My own meal was a dry stew of tenderloin lamb and beef with spiced butter, onion, and other pungent seasonings like chili pepper, garlic, and ginger- to name only a few in the medley of Ethiopian jumble. Tearing off a piece of bread made from wheat, barley and teff, I grabbed as much stew as I could for every mouthful. The flavours were fresh. The acidity of the bread combined with the savoury spices of the stew were bright, and an expectedly heavy dish actually tasted very clean, characteristic of a tart and simple tomato sauce. And though there were no tomatoes in the dish, the garlic, cooked just until tender on the cusp of being raw and caramelized along with the basil used to pepper the dish made it seem so. The meat itself was somewhat tough, but its small, diced character made it manageable, and though I felt the salad to be a mere courtesy, chopped romaine lettuce with a supermarket dressing, it was outshined by the better qualities of the dish.

And if we weren’t being hedonistic enough struggling to finish our enormous portions, we made sure to ask the host if there was anything good to drink, to which we were answered with by three bottles of Ethiopian stout: a beer with a strong molasses aroma, fruity body and caramel head. Its most intriguing quality however, was that it managed to hold its own full flavor without being hoppy; instead, it was plummy and rich.

My party and I were more than satisfied, though feeling a little guilty at not having been able to finish our plates. We were invited to come back for some Ethiopian coffee soon, and calling ahead for our orders so we could avoid any wait for future meals and of course, the coffee, which takes a slow twenty minutes to brew, our host being very apologetic for not having been able to get our food to us sooner. That’s right, nothing but courtesy at Lovenest. But it was over our heads, because we were more excited about coming back.

Lovenest
183 King St.East Kitchener,
ON N2G 2K8
(519) 570-0990

Tuesday 12:00pm - 10:00pm
Wednesday & Thursday 12:00pm - 09:00pm
Friday 12:00 - 10:00pm
Saturday 12:00pm - 11:00pm Sunday 01:00pm - 10:00pm

Payment methods: Debit card, visa, master and cash

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Beeswax!

Quandary, young masters: do you really know where your food comes from? As I found myself at the most unholy of holies: the St. Jacob's Farmer's Market in quest of beeswax because I apparently make cosmetics now (day creams are a lot like dishes), I passed a stall full of lovely farm folk braying like mules and shellin' out the deals, specifically a quart of raspberries for a price my poor ass would consider a deal. I thought: wow, Ontario grown raspberries in September on the cheap, hellz yeah!

I was excited, elated, pushin' louts out of the way, eying every quart to see which had the biggest, most voluptuous, least moldy berries in the room. Unfortunately for me, I looked up only to find the beams surrounding the structural integrity of the stall stocked with boxes sans produce. That is, waxy empty produce crates that once held things like strawberries, raspberries, grapes (wait, what?) all from places other than Ontario. At least, that's what them there boxes dun told me. Damn. I mean, I still bought the berries, because as I've mentioned I'm not a political eater, I'd eat a dolphin if I got the chance. In fact, I someday plan on eating a dolphin. I don't anthropomorphize animals. I eat them.

So I wondered, where did these berries come from? In my old cynic age, I didn't even bother to ask, because even if they had said Ontario, I would still have been skeptical, because the last thing a woman in a bonnet needs to worry about is if someone's gonna be angry about being able to buy something cheap and home grown. I don't think Mennonites are too political; they're back to the landers, yes, but their priority is survival, not anti-captilast, consumer fruit ethics ensuring the environment is saved and migrant workers are getting paid for their good work. They're no comfy chairs to sit and sip espresso with around. The poor people at the market are probably buyers and sellers, taking produce from suppliers and selling them to you, the nostalgic shopper who thinks the market somehow connects you to a more authentic genuine form of reality, a sentimentality of the Bourgeoisie, who even 200 years ago were trying to find their authentic selves, thanks Henry David Thoreau. And you know what, merchants gladly play the game so they can get hacks to continually buy their 'better' stuff. Now, not all parts of the market are like this, but I'm willing to argue that when it comes to produce, there certainly is a huge discrepancy there. You can usually find out what is 'locally' grown by the price, which is even more proof that the suppliers don't care about the environment, but the size of their wallets. The food doesn't come from afar, and a lot isn't organic. In fact, it'd technically be cheaper to buy closer to home. The paradox, however, is that it's not. In fact, when you buy you are supporting the luxury of being able to say you support a cause that elevates you to some social level above those who shop at the grocery store because food's less expensive. And the merchants know they can do that to you, because you enter into some universal, unquestioned agreement. Maybe you can barter, but maybe not. Are you really supporting the farmers? Truth-be-told, they'd probably grow things and sell them elsewhere; they wouldn't go poor, and they wouldn't starve and die. So let's all be a little leery, shall we? Or not, I don't care. Everyone who's anyone knows how much I dislike the market specifically because of all the social-cultural-class-whatever pandemics it reinforces. I make a note of complaining to it at least once a year. There is no point in going unless you want something on the cheap (rare), or just tasty, or unfindable elsewhere (terrible word choice); other than that, it's all a bunch of, wait for it, beeswax.

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また心揺れる。

Ivan Orkin, a white dude in Japan who opened a successful ramen shop e-mailed me back this morning, after a good 3 months of constant e-mail pestering. I wanted to work for free. Unfortunately, I don't speak fluent Japanese and don't have papers, so I am an unlikely candidate. My heart breaks. Is my dream finally over? Who knows, I don't own a crystal ball. And the coffee psychic never said anything. Only things I don't care about, like love. Phh. Geeze. Chinese won't teach me noodling, Laos only teach me about Buddha, and a white dude in Japan won't let me wash his toilets. I'll be stuck readin' books forever. Alas.

-w

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The Food of Our Forefathers

We all hold on to summer in different ways. I can’t recite a sappy list, because I don’t really know what other people do to pay homage to the sappiest of seasons, and to be brutally honest, I’ve no ritual myself. I’ve been sojourned in this city my entire life, and at the end of every summer I find myself piously stuck to working whatever job I have without making plans to travel or camp or cottage. So this morning as I rose, late as usual, and partial to the idea of going out for Korean I thought to myself, how in the world could I honor the readers that give my meanderings through food land the once over, especially when they find themselves back in the cool, sweaty grip of fall, creeping a couple weeks away? What was cliché and summery? Sappy, yet aestival? (That also means summery.)

Hamburgers.

That was my answer. I pride myself on my own gastronomic sense- how I can write about food and make it culturally poignant, and not only an issue of mere eating for the sake of saving money and filling stomachs? If you find yourself starting school and saddened by that fact, yearning for the previous months you spent not going to school know that this review is here for you. Let it warm the cockles of your summertime heart (there’s a phrase I’ll use again). I’ll even join in the nostalgic fun.

When I was a young adherent of the Dane Cook of martial arts (that’s Karate, for those of you unfamiliar with the way of the fist), it was a ritual of my father and I after every class, every Saturday morning to visit Sonny’s Drive-In: a hamburger joint. Now, I don’t think my father brought me because he really thought long and hard about how much I’d love hamburgers. I think it was just a way for him to visit the owner (whom I’ve come to know as Sonny, though that name is no part of his identity at all), one of his many friends in the food business. If I had any memory of the place it was of my strange attachment to the nameless arcade I would always play. If memory serves, I operated as some big, hyper-masculine shirtless blonde man wrestling tigers in a coliseum. I never got further than that. But I played it. Every weekend. After every class I more or less got a whooping in.

That was some twenty years ago. Now, as an old man, and anonymous, and without my father, I found myself venturing there, thinking about how good the hamburgers must be, because the otherwise outmoded lot that is Sonny’s Drive-In is still getting business to this day. I know this because I’ve always been around, passing it by, observing.

Although I didn’t expect the place to change in the least, I at least expected someone there to happily greet me. That is how I biasly constructed the memory of my past. So, if anything changed, it may have been Sonny’s disposition, because he was still there, working hard and serving customers, older than ever; now in the company of a faceless employee working the fryers and decked out in a white uniform reminiscent of Americana’s hamburger shop past. Yes, everything was the same. The steel counter, the sneeze guard glass where you’d choose the toppings for whatever hamburger or hot dog you wanted to eat, the red tile, the glowing menu board where clip-on letters and numbers were used to spell out items and their prices, even the chocolate shake machine was still running, albeit eerily. The arcades were different though, and the ceiling too: brown painted faux wood floorboards now lay overhead.

There’s nowhere to sit in the place, only a legless table attached to the glass wall that looks out onto the modern world where one can stand and eat, and maybe cry over the fact that they can’t be part of a more nostalgic, genuine, naïve time when Marty McFly got his mom to fall in love with him.

Whatever.

For me, Sonny’s was a scary place. I’ve never been more intimidated ordering a hamburger and fries and soda in archaic cup. Though customers were coming and going, ordering food and telling me I wouldn’t be sorry, I could tell I was getting on the helps’ nerve critically looking over a menu that ran the gamut from hamburger to hot dog to fish and chips to scallops and fries (probably the most intriguing choice on the menu). And you’d be hard pressed to really find any kind of deal or combination plate like the ones that accompany most burger joints. You just pick and choose from the menu and whatever the cost is, the cost is. Still, it was a little cheaper than most conventional places. And with that, I placed my order, and took Sonny’s taking my dirty money and handling my burger thereafter as a sign not of poor standards, but of his tender regress to a safer time in our forefathers’ history when food sanitation wasn’t a big deal.

Again. Whatever.

So, a little standoffish, I went along the line, chose my toppings, had my items placed in a greasy paper bag and went outside to the weathered picnic tables, imprinted with the word ‘Sonny’s’ and carved hearts with monikers such as ‘Dave + Sarah’, and ‘F and A Forever.’ I could only imagine how hard my food would be to stomach.

Now, there are typical things to expect when eating a hamburger; charred, savoury meat paddies; soft, starch ridden buns. Usually, these generalizations are found with every plain paddy when eating out. I expected it with mine. However, there were some flavours I just couldn’t understand. Like a paddy that seemed a little sour, and pickles that were rubber, and all too squeaky. If not for these characteristics I may have very well said my hamburger was okay, but that there was nothing special about it. Still, in a city with so many places offering the good ground round, the only thing that may make Sonny’s burgers sellable might be patriotism and some notion that its hamburgers are somehow authentic, having earned their burgery place after so long.

The fries too were typical fare, though I admit better than the fast food chains we’re used to going to. Not scrawny and brittle in the least, but hardy and firm, crunchy if eaten immediately out of the fryer. But again, this is matched by so many. If there was one bit of serendipity about them it may have been the flecks of batter that managed to land in my box (runoff from the fingers of deep fried fish). This was something I thoroughly enjoyed, though unintended, obviously, by the cooks.

Maybe I was trying to recapture the past, or maybe I created the memory that my past was pretty dope, though I can’t for the life of me remember how stellar the food at Sonny’s was, and maybe there’s a reason for that. After all, twenty years ago, Sonny was a lot younger, and so was I. Perspective certainly may have been lacking. Now, I was a mere bald stranger. Certainly, I could have reminded him who I was, but why break an old man’s heart? More importantly, why break mine, especially if he didn’t care? For now, I’ll pretend Sonny is a man who loves the people he serves, not a man who can’t retire because his food shows no greater competitive value.

Sonny's Drive-In
(519) 884-1750
256 Weber St N Waterloo,
ON N2J 3H6

ANY PAYMENT

SUN-THURS 10 am – 1 am

FRI-SAT 10 am – 3 am

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The Immutable Drive For Ramen

*RESTAURANT CLOSED*


Sometimes I have to remind myself that food is just food. That if things go south, no problem. It's just food. It's a mindful exercise I constantly find myself practising, usually after getting bent out of shape over something culinary. I could sit and stew for hours, but I know it's never productive. I just have to move on to the next thing. My mother tells me a large part of cooking is experimenting, so it's bound to go bad the majority of the time. Understandable. But it's hard to take me ma'am seriously when her cooking's some of the most frustrating stuff in my culinary world. An Italian mother bad at cooking? Hey, nobody's perfect. She has her off days. Lately, it seems more than usual. After careful consideration I think it's a mere symptom of my family's being raised to be polite to the chef and just respectfully say the food tastes good- either that, or everyone has a terrible palette. Alas, all I can do is bite my tongue, because no amount of reminders to my mother: that she should write a recipe down to remember it, or that she shouldn't try to cook so much things at once because she always ends up burning something, or that the elements on our stupid five billion dollar poser gas stove are so small they can never bring water to a boil, will ever influence any active change in her. She claims her chicken stock is good, but when its cooled and there's 2 inches of yellow fat like a sheet of ice on the top and a nimbus of chicken slurry on the bottom and dark amber stock between the both, it makes you wonder how put together a stock is when it separates to such a disturbing degree.

Food in my family is too political; if criticism is offered it's not constructive, its only used to show the person who didn't cook how theoretically better they would have made it. Maybe for all of us- I know certainly for me- culinary know how seems to be the only cultural capital I have as of late. And even then it's pretty sub-standard. Yes, food and I have a personal vandetta. Because if I can't wrestle it into tasteful submission, I somehow take it as a sign that I'm becoming weaker, falling apart, losing an arbitrary battle I decided to fight one fateful arbitrary day years ago. Cooking is, after all, how I justify my civility. Who needs to make a torte, really?
But what's a dude to do? Move on with his life? Not this noodle slinging, kung food adherent. Oh no. I just eat more bitter. I stubbornly research, ask around, patiently wait for opportunity. Conventionally, it's admired. We love seeing things work out for our heroes. We never hear stories in popular culture of our heroes waiting without having things work out for them in the end. Samuel Beckett wrote a play where just that happened. He was praised for it. But if the majority of tales were like that, eaters would be hatin' yo. Nobody wants to see that. I certainly don't want to hear that, not after 5 years of attempting to make my own noodles. Pasta, no problem. I'm unmatched. But chewy, bouncy, voluptuous Asian noodles? Ramen or Chinese, or soba? Forget it. My culinary kryptonite. I just can't make the stuff, even after trying for years. Soba, I can kinda do, but it's not good enough. My ramen's too bitter, and my lo mian too boring. What's worse? I have no standard to measure it against. A good cook learns by eating; and the better the culinary environment, the better a shot he has at making something outstanding. The problem with Kitchener-Waterloo, in my opinion, and, at least, from the perspective of East Asian cuisine, is that there is no sense of competition. Everything more or less tastes the same, and no one says a thing. Cooks don't try to out do themselves, there's no need to, because there's always a whole slew of university students in this town to eat, with undeveloped palettes and a general dismissal for good tasting food. They don't care, just so long as their bellies are full. It's heartbreaking. For me anyway, because what it means is that I'm gastronomically sojourned. Can I find ramen to eat in this town? only at one place. Is it worth eating? I'm disappointed to say, no.

I've been peering the option in the window for a good 4 months, telling my closest ramen supporting friend about it, but he only deterred me. He said immediately it wouldn't be good, and my logical gastronomic self was apt to believe him, but the adventurous part of me said to throw caution to the window, as I foolishly do. So when I had 10 dollars to junk, I went for it, and let me tell you: there was nothing good about it. You thought I discovered something great, didn't you? Nope. Not in this city. There are no ramen aficionados. I might be the closest one. I'm the only one who, in the heat of the night, tries to make the damned noodles. Never the stock though. One step at a time.

So let me break it down. The noodles: instant. The broth: a mixture of the ramen packet that comes with the instant noodles and the restaurant's own, dare I say, mediocre chicken broth. How could I tell? The stock had the salty, artificial flavour so familiar of so many instant cups. It wasn't a good, savoury saltiness, like something you'd get from say, cheese. And to add insult to injury, the presentation was a little mash-up of small, chopped, cubed ingredients in a soupy bowl of noodles that, after sitting for a bit, absorbed the stock and became slimy and stodgy (shit, no I didn't). The noodles, like a sack of sand, refused to move in the bowl, though they certainly had the room when the piping hot, promising dish came to me at the beginning.


There were no separate morsels, no slices of meat, lone egg, fish cakes, or tender vegetables decorated around the bowl. It was like someone took Shanghai noodles (the favoured dish of mixed chopped ingredients left over, stir-fried with noodles and slammed on a plate- usually delicious, though humble) and threw it in a bowl of soup. That's right. It had all the characteristics of Asian stir-fry: scrambled egg, diced vegetables, saturated flavour. Let's face it, that's not creative. Not in the least, because you know as well as I know that that kind of old stir-fried rice characteristic is the symptom (that's right, twice in one entry) of a terrible, Chinese-Canadian-American-Othering culinary past; one with a residue I wish never to have cover my meal. But alas, there it was.

That wasn't sweat the waitress saw on my face when she asked me if the soup was too spicy, it was frustration. Will anyone ever care? Will there ever be a cook who shakes the culinary scene of Kitchener-Waterloo?

It's just food Weezee, it's just food.


(Oh, and I won't bother to tell you where to get the stuff, out of sympathy for the place, and the fact that it's the only place that sells a dish labeled ramen. So when you find it, you'll find it... and in all fairness, it was a bold move after all to even attempt to offer it. Wait, did I just answer my question? IS this an example of someone shaking the culinary world? Phh. Yeah right.)

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