Thursday, February 12, 2009

In Bed



Yes, this is another post about food. Please bear with me. Food is important to me. I enjoy food. In fact, I enjoy food so much that I could pretty much live on it. If all you gave me to eat for the rest of my life was food, I could survive. OK, and maybe something to drink. But that's it.

If you're like me, you enjoy Chinese food. Now, we all pretty much know that "Chinese food" a more of a blurred reflection of Chinese cuisine with a very Americanized twist. But if you love it, you love it nonetheless.

There is one phenomena that, at least from where I sit, seems to remain true about Chinese restaurants and I wonder if you've seen it as well. That is, when a Chinese restaurant opens, it's great. The food is tastey, the vegetables fresh, the fried foods are crisp, and the fortune cookies say wonderful things like, "You will discover a big pile of money in your sock drawer."

However, give the joint a year and you begin to notice a downward slide in quality. Things don't seem quite as fresh as they once did, the food is mushier, less flavorful, and they give you that barely discernable sigh of annoyance when you ask for an extra little tub of duck sauce.

By year two, you've found somewhere else to get your Chinese food from. Then comes that one day when you're just craving beef teriyaki and they are the only place that delivers. So you order from them once more. It arrives. You eat. And you realize why you stopped going there. You never order from there again. In six to eight months, the place changes hands, puts up a new sign, and the cycle repeats.

I think Chinese food joints have about a one year half life. What do you guys think?

2 comments:

AsterixChaos said...

As fast as those places go up, coupled with this astute observation, I can't help but think that these guys shop at the same place as Wile E. Coyote. They mail order from some shady catalog, get a couple of "just add water" pills, and a little business pops out. That must be why they have such a short lifespan. The shelf life on the magic pills just runs out.

Anonymous said...

I think I'm hungry for Chinese food now. Thanks a lot!

Spargoit: no idea.