Be the Half Portions

I’m back in a place that specializes in Jiang Nan food.  These must be buckwheat seeds in my tea? The table across from me has a carafe of red wine, which looks appetizing, but I’ll pass, as got a lot of work still pending.  The last time I cam here the boss came over to my table and insisted that the next time I came I should only order half portions.  This stuck in my mind.  I’m only one guy.  If I could go and cut the price to half of all that’s on the menu, well, that would be good value and I could sample more things. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I sat down with this in mind tonight.  As everything will be half price, why not order a variety?  Try different tastes.  I’d forgotten that when one orders here, it’s all off an iPad.  Only issue is that only half the things listed have pictures, and the font is puny, so it ends up being more of a hassle than a bold step into modernity.  I ordered one dish on the iPad and it prompted me to decide the portion size.  I choose the smaller portion.  What’s tofu dish all about?  Once again, would you like the large or the small?  I clicked on the small portion.  By now I’d figured out that these must be the half portions the boss man had in mind. 

I asked the waitress to help me see my order total.  “So, can I get half portion of these?  Or are these all the half portions?  This would have been a confusing question in English and it took some repeating in Chinese.  Upshot:  They weren’t going to reduce the costs any further, so I had better do some editing.   Alright then, three dishes will be more than enough.

The boss is here again tonight.  Good man. He appears to be hosting a large table of people across from me.  Short black hair, a balding patch atop, big black glass frames and an exaggerated overbite, loose sleeves on a black shirt with a Sun Zhong Shan collar, he looks a bit like a stock character from a movie of Shanghai in the 1930s.  He across from me, dining with the table of people whom I’d characterize as “old.”  And this mean they are probably all my age.  They’re drinking red wine from the carafe I’d mentioned.  But they drink in a southern style with sips and instead of dares.  No one raises their voice.

He’s on top of me suddenly.  Fiddling with the register to my left.  He jumped up and came over to work the register beside me.  Looking up, I told him the food tasted great in local dialect.  He noted that I could speak local dialect.  I replied in local dialect that I could not speak local dialect. He opens his mouth widely, and yells across the room that I can speak local dialect.  He says this twice.  Always twice.  And so the beautiful woman with long blacks locks framing her pale face and red lips all bundled up in long trench coat with a young man in a black tee shirt on either side, seated  off to the left and the plain woman with thick frames, reluctantly occupying a dress in pursuit of her loud child passing in front, she and the table with the wine, all stop now, and consider me anew, for a moment.