Last night, out to dinner with a business associate, in town from another city. Last week, with two guests in town, we had excellent dinners at Lotus and Wooloomooloo. But this guy …

(Hey, if you’re him, and you read the blog (I don’t think you don’t), don’t get me wrong here, you’re a great guy and all but …)

… this guy has to be around 40. He makes a great salary. He’s lived in three major cities around the world and traveled extensively. And I’m not sure he’s ever had a good meal in his life. He thinks that all western food is “a piece of meat on a plate with no sauce.” His utter refusal to go for anything other than Chinese food frustrates my attempts to educate him in this area.

Since we were in Causeway Bay, and since he’ll only go for Chinese (and non-spicy at that), first I tried Skyview, but they couldn’t fit us in before 9:30 and it was 7 and we were hungry. Then I tried suggesting Tack Hsin, Tai Woo, Hoi Tin or Little Sheep. None of them too exciting but all reliable. And since he’s on a business trip and the company would pay for the meal, I figured money wouldn’t matter too much, and these are all moderately priced places anyway (unless you start going for shark fin or abalone).

He paused in front of Steak Expert. He knows it as the place where Bus Uncle worked for two weeks. I know it as the place that I tried once, ordered the rib eye steak, and found that 6 ounces of my ten ounce steak were fat and gristle.

Eventually he picked Tsui Wah. What the Cantonese refer to, I believe, as a cha chan teng. It’s open 24 hours, has branches all around town, it’s cheap and the menu is huge. Despite being on a busy street and having an English menu, the staff does not speak English.

There were four of us, and here’s what we had:

Singapore noodle with sweet and sour prawn – nice fresh prawns, dried fried noodles with almost no sauce (actually not a bad thing because what little sauce they had was sickenly sweet, the “sour” provided by the presence of four uncooked sichuan peppers on the plate).

Lamb chop curry – an almost sweet curry (probably from a powder mix) with three lamb chops that were almost all fat and gristle, served with an attempt at roti and a lump of really scary looking mashed potato. (And while we were provided with forks and knives for that dish, we were only given tiny rice bowls. You try cutting up a lamb chop in a rice bowl with a butter knife.)

Spaghetti with seafood – a meager amount of tomato sauce (from a tin) with some dried out bits of fish, clam, squid, etc.

Fish ball soup – the least horrible dish.

T kept leaning over and whispering in my ear to ask if I hated the food as much as she did. I was thinking I would have been better off just ordering the ham sandwich.

I would so love to take this guy to a good place but he just never gives me the chance.

Back home, where T provided further torture by immediately putting on the Asian Food Channel and we looked at all the stuff we didn’t come close to having, first on the Go! Hokkaido show and then Gordon Ramsay’s F Word.

Well, I’m off to Taipei in a short while and I know the friend I’m meeting for dinner will choose something better.

Hongkie Town
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