Restaurant Roulette

Last night I hooked up with a friend I'd not seen for a good 9 years. He was a literature/philosophy student when I knew him. He graduated and went, as most of us humanities ponderers do at some point, into the closely related field of hospitality. I’m sure there's a steady stream of waiting staff the world over who've poured over Foucault, Derrida and Kant only to find ample opportunity to flex that useful knowledge in their jobs. A degree in philosophy also works well as an apprenticeship for a career in that other related industry - retail. It’s an obvious career progression.

Anyway, he probably would've been a waiter forever, except that with his nous and tenacity, not to mention a good line in bullshit, he must have made 'the right friends' and has now reinvented himself as a 'Wine Consultant' (I very nearly typed 'Wind' there - and what an apt little slip it would have been, as you’ll soon see), and is set to start a food and wine column for some rag of repute in Melbourne - knowing as he does, 'the right people'.

When we hooked up last night he took me to a splendidly tasteful little establishment where we had an assortment of rather costly tapas, and the star of the evening was a bottle of wine which exceeded my yearly projected budget for the stuff. During the course of the evening I learnt a little bit about wine appreciation - about notes, about acidity, about fruity wines (they are cheap unless there is a depth and balance to the other elements apparently), about the scent of the earth which yielded the crop. I was told that the wine we were having was a 'deeply unfashionable, much maligned yet eminently drinkable' Riesling, and I was counselled against drinking more wine after dessert, lest the acid notes dominate by comparison, thereby corrupting the memory of that first, cleansing sip, which I was told would be akin to biting into a Granny Smith apple. My companion did do an exceedingly good line in bullshit (indeed, I expect no less from any self-respecting fellow Arts graduate) and while I felt for much of the night as if I was at an audition reading for the film ‘Sideways’, he (and perhaps the wine itself) managed to convince me that it is possible to keep a straight face when musing that there is un soupçon of asparagus about a glass of white. Well, as long as they pay you well to say so.

The evening made me realise what a miserable little cheapskate I am when it comes to eating out, with little sense of occasion and even less of those other vital ‘eating’ senses like smell, touch and taste…although perhaps it is fair to say I have a finely honed bullshit detector. And a keen sense of my own financial reality. If I were to write a review of the last place I ate at, it would go something like this:

The Shanghai Dumpling House* is tucked away in a less traversed part of Chinatown. It retains the 70s period charm of oak-panel veneer and a carpet not unlike that of a nightclub that has seen years of beer spillages, bodily emissions and gum-trammellings. A few years back it was on the brink of closure after it was visited by some officials from the Department of Health, who declared it unfit to continue trading. The reports mentioned rats, cockroaches and dishes that were less than clean. I was horrified – not about the rodents, but about the prospect of losing this gem of a place, where you can fill up on unprocessed, delicious food for less than 10 Aussie bucks. This was an establishment I’d frequented a few times with nary more than the odd stomach pain, and I’ve yet to come across a friend who has had a bad experience after eating there. Perhaps we all have iron guts, but I think it’s more a case of enjoying the odd spot of restaurant roulette. If you’re prepared to risk a bout of mild food poisoning, you get for your trouble a cheap, no-fuss, nutritious meal - the way it might be served in China itself. Luckily, the SDH remained open to the public, with little discernable change to its practices….

At the SDH, patrons help themselves to scratched plastic mugs, still dripping wet from whatever large vat of other dirty dishes they might have been lifted from. You pluck them apart from the stack of other cups they’re suctioned to and line up, Salvation Army style, at a huge steel (you hope it’s steel anyway – that would reduce the likelihood that what comes out of it is tarnished by rust) urn and flick a little lever, cask wine style, to release a very murky looking liquor which you can only hope and surmise is ‘tea’. You then collect an assortment of plastic crockery and utensils (chopsticks if you’re feeling lucky) and head back to the table to order. The menus are soup-stained, dog-eared and present challenging descriptions of ‘chillie prorn noodle’ and ‘peanut satan stick’. The ‘Chinese menu’ is always much longer than the ‘English menu’, perhaps because the more sinister dishes involving the off-the-beaten-track parts of some poor animal cannot be adequately described to the anglophone punters. At least, not without further trouble from the Health Department or the RSPCA.

You will likely be served by a very young girl with no understanding of anything you are trying to say, or an older woman who knows all too well what you are trying to say but is being as wilfully unpleasant as she can possibly be. Whoever your host is for the evening, she or he will invariably move any old globs of soy sauce around the table with a bacteria-ridden, grey dishcloth before dealing out your orders and leaving you to get on with it.

Choose carefully though, and you are rewarded with succulent dumplings, handmade noodles with shiitake mushrooms, emerald green vegetables, all in the tastiest of sauces. It helps to be a vegetarian, like me – how badly can a carrot poison you? SDH has a lightning turnover, and everything comes out of the kitchen at a 100 degrees, so as long as you knock it back before it goes lukewarm, there’s no way those little suckers are going to have a chance to work their voodoo on your guts. Five stars.


*Names have been changed to protect the guilty.