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Golden
Chopsticks
Review by
Maarten Elffers
Monday night
in Lusaka and looking for a restaurant to take my guest. That's
easier said than done; a lot of establishments are closed that day.
This is why we ended up at Golden Chopsticks in Chipovu Road; open
seven days a week.
The two of us
chose to sit outside on the terrace as my guest is a smoker and
doesn't want to inconvenience others. How we would come to regret
this choice of location. The waiter very quickly brought us menus
and took our drink orders. We started making our choices. The
beverages arrived, but what a disappointment; the beer was warm.
Now, in my book, that is something equivalent to high treason: beer
has to be served cold. Upon our remarks re the drinks temperature,
the waiter proudly told us that the bottles had been put in the
fridge just five minutes earlier, all by himself. My suggestion to
put the next round in the freezer remained unnoticed.
Our orders
were taken, and we started the wait by looking around the garden in
front of the terrace. While our eyes went round the foliage, the
restaurant door opened, one of the cooks ran outside into the garden
and started urinating against one of the trees, in full view of the
guests. We were not the only ones with rather startled looks on our
faces. Absolutely amazing.
Still getting
to terms to what we just had witnessed, our starters arrived, a
portion of springrolls. I happen to like springrolls and normally
consume them with chili sauce or paste and some soya sauce. The
plate didn't carry anything other than the springrolls. I asked the
waiter for the paste and sauce, but the man did not understand my
request. Hence my leap into the restaurant and my subsequent request
to the daughter of the proprietor to bring some paste and sauce. She
acknowledged my question with the response "sure" in such a
disapproving way, like she wanted to say "okay, if you REALLY want
it", that I immediately gave up on receiving the condiments. We
waited for ten minutes, with the springrolls going cold, but still
no paste or sauce.
The main
course, or half of it, arrived instead. Suspecting that we were
going to experience the whole meal cold, we swallowed the
springrolls without the condiments. The second half of the main
course arrived, only it didn't particularly look like what we
ordered. We thought we had ordered braised fish with garlic - what
we got was something with garlic alright, but it wasn't fish. We
managed to explain to the waiter that this wasn't exactly what we
had in mind, and he removed the plate - only to return with it a
minute later, stating that this was really menu item number 56 as
ordered. I asked for the menu again, checked that 56 was indeed
Braised fish with Garlic and then set on to taste the "fish". It was
chicken.
Five minutes
of chaotic scenes went by, whereby the chicken was declared fish and
that it was my imagination that had gone astray. Yeah, right. We
decided that we were going to eat chicken as the restaurant was
clearly not going to give us fish. Only, by this time, the
temperature outside had dropped and my guest was feeling cold - so
we asked for our cold food and warm drinks to be transferred inside.
Another decision which came to haunt us.
We moved
inside and started to eat. We were almost at the end of the main
course when the waiter arrived with the chili paste and soya sauce
that we had missed at the starter stage. He was very disappointed
when we indicated that we didn't see any use for it at that specific
moment.
In the mean
time, at the table next to us, most of the Chinese owners and
workers in the restaurant had gathered for their own meal. One of
the men was a very quick eater and was finished before everybody
else, and started to do some body maintenance; clipping his nails.
First he did his fingernails and then went on to handle his
toenails. It must have been a couple of months since he had last
executed this job. I can tell, because one of the clipped nails flew
through the air and landed on our table. It must have been almost
half a centimeter long. Luckily for us this coincided with the
consumption of our last mouthfuls of our meal and we could ask for
the bill.
The lady
proprietor of the restaurant looked at me strangely when upon her
invitation to "Please come again soon" our suggestion was to rename
her establishment "Rusty Chopsticks".
Yet despite
all this, the chicken and other dishes were extremely tasty.
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July
2006