Towards the end of September, word hit us of a new 'western style' restaurant that was opening up in Lanshan. Lanshan! As if! Well, that sounded like a real turn up for the books, so naturally we were very excited to try it out. I love the chinese food, have eaten some great stuff here (along with some not so great and some better left unknown) and grown quite fond of cabbage, but a taste of the homeland is not something to be overlooked. So one night we ventured forth to have a look.
Bless 'em, they tried.
The restaurant is called 'Eiffel westernstyledrsh'. It was clearly going for a french theme with the 'Eiffel' part and a picture of the Mona Lisa on the name board over the door. I think the rest of the name meant to work out as 'western style dish'. Nevermind, eh? We would have told them, had it not been in big neon letters outside already. Besides, no-one spoke any english, and we were alone. We pointed to two random dishes on the chinese menu and received broadly the same meal, some meat in a tomatoey sauce with a little salad and some rice. It was edible. It was a bit wierd being presented with knives and forks though. After a month of chopsticks I just looked at them and thought 'what the hell do I do with these!'. Not to worry though, there were place-mats with clear instructions on how to use them, along with hints on etiquette - no elbows on the table etc. All was read with elbows firmly affixed to the table...
After finishing the main meal, under the constant gaze of the whole staff, who all came out to watch us eat, we decided to order a dessert. I found the characters for dessert in the phrase book, showed the waitress and she gestured to a page of chinese, which interestingly was not the one with pictures of ice-cream on it. Maybe we should have taken more notice of that fact. After pointing at two random things, we received...two sandwiches.
Okay...
Mine was a kind of eggy-bread affair, which could possibly be construed as some kind of sweet dessert-like option, but Anthony's was a straight-up steak and onion sarnie. No ambiguity there.
But hey, this is china. We didn't question it (disregarding the fact we couldn't anyway) and ate up, wondering if the staff truly believed this was a normal 'western style' meal they had given us, or whether all their carefully-formed ideas of westerners were being dashed and that apparently westerners eat sandwiches for dessert...
Well, either way, I will not be returning. The next morning I had been to the loo about 6 times before breakfast. Talk about eye of a needle... It took the mega-imodium to sort that one out. My first real bout of food-poisoning, and it was with western style food. How bloody typical.
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