Eatdrink #67 September/October 2017 "The Decade Issue"

66 | September/October 2017
The Lighter Side
Home-Cooked Meals
eatdrink.ca |@eatdrinkmag
By ADRIAN ZEE
Meals in university are often
associated with instant noodles,
pizza deliveries, and plenty of
alcohol, while reminiscing about
home cooked meals usually brings up images
of Mom’s roast beef. These stereotypes
are almost flipped for me. At Western
— approximately two hours away
from my hometown of Markham,
Ontario — I cook every meal.
At home, I’m always at a
restaurant, or finding my
chopsticks reaching for a
plastic takeout container filled
with beef and broccoli.
This irony is due to many
things. One is that at school I
eat on my own dime, making
a $16-per-week grocery bill
significantly more appealing than
that $20 Domino’s pizza. Another
reason is that takeout and restaurants are
how my Hong Kong parents operate; coming
from a city that never stops moving, the time
spent cooking a meal is worth more than the
premium charged by a restaurant.
At this point you might think, “Wow,
this guy gets to eat at so many different
restaurants,” and this is where you would
be horribly wrong. Most of my family
dinners are at a cha chan teng, a Hong Kong
diner ten minutes away from my Markham
home. To say my family goes often is an
understatement, to say we go everyday isn’t
far from the truth.
The thought of going to the same restaurant
all the time may seem nonsense to some —
with so much variety and so many options,
why stick to one restaurant? But to me, this
specific HK diner is my home cooked meal.
The waitresses know my family by name
and our orders by heart. The other morning,
I deviated slightly from my usual order — an
iced milk tea instead of an iced lemon tea, and
the 50-year-old, red-haired, Chinese waitress
replied with, “Are you sure?” as if she was
stunned by what she just heard.
This customer experience (my favourite
business school buzzword!) isn’t exclusive to
my family at all — most customers at this
place are regulars. In fact, I’ve seen everything
from a customer venting furiously about his
wife to a waitress on her lunch break, to
someone asking to borrow a piece
of ginger because the grocery
store was closed (the owner
subsequently went into the
kitchen and handed him a
whole root — free of charge).
The staff here aren’t your
servers, they’re your friends,
and they don’t shy away from
doing what they want either –
whether it’s serving guests while
munching an apple or simply
kicking someone out for getting
on their nerves. This is no fine dining
institution.
As for the food, it has truly become my
version of a home cooked meal. I never crave
what my mom cooks (with the amount of
times we eat out, I question whether she still
knows how to cook). Instead, I crave this
diner’s French toast and baked tomato sauce
streak, and ONLY this particular diner’s.
The place is closed on Tuesdays, and I
often feel lost and find myself at a different
HK diner, only for my family and I to conjure
a dozen complaints about this unfamiliar
restaurant’s food: the sauce is too watery, the
food is too salty, the bread is too dry…
My friends who suffer through my constant
Snapchat food pictures understand the
amount of times I go to this place. “Again?”
they reply.
Yes, again. Where else would I go?
A natural extroverted introvert, ADRIAN ZEE is a
freelance writer, a SaaS Sales Rep, and an amateur food
blogger. You can find his poetry and food writing at www.
AdrianZee.com.