Michael W.
Yelp
I AM SO MAD!!! First to the owners: What really helps a family-owned, non-chain Asian restaurant succeed on the York Road corridor is not responding to reviews of your business in such an unprofessional way. What also helps is serving excellent Americanized or countryside food with good service. Now the review!
So some roads, you think you know them. You drive them a hundred times, and they're just asphalt and streetlights. But every now and then, a new place opens up, a new door on a familiar street, and you find yourself pulled in by a curious kind of dread. You think, why not? And that's where the horror begins.
We should have known. The signs were there from the start. The kind of signs you only see in hindsight, when the slow-motion car wreck is already in your rearview mirror. The decor was a hodgepodge of broken promises--tables that didn't match, like mismatched gravestones, and on each one, a solitary cup of straws, as if to say, You'll need a dozen more, pilgrim, before this is over. The windows were smeared with the grime of a thousand unspoken nights, eyes that refused to see the light.
When they handed us the menus, they weren't just menus; they were leather-bound relics. I opened mine, and flakes of something old, something dried, fell out, a silent harbinger of what was to come. A tiny plate of stale rock-hard wontons followed, petrified bones waiting for a lick of sauce--not that the sauces would help. The duck sauce was an old sweet, sickly smear, and the mustard, a watery yellow confession of defeat.
The vegetable egg rolls came next. I bit into mine, and there it was--the cold spot. A core of profound, unholy chill surrounded by a piping hot exterior. Like a lie. You chew on it, and it tells you that something is very wrong, but by then, it's too late. We should have run. We should have thrown open the door and fled into the welcoming neon glow of Fuji San, Fusion, Green Leaf, Miku Sushi and Steakhouse, Sonny Lee's Hunan Taste, or Umi Sake. All of which we have eaten at for years and loved... but we sadly stayed. We watched as our entrees arrived, bathed in a theatrical light meant to hide the terrible truth.
The dishes themselves were simple, but in their simplicity lay a kind of cosmic horror. The vegetables had a creeping brown rot at the edges, and the white rice, once a thing of purity, carried the foul stench of mothballs, a whisper of graves long forgotten. My fried rice, for which I had paid extra, was just brown rice with nothing in it, no veggies, no meat, just a blank canvas of bleakness. The sauces were a pale, gelatinous slurry, tasting of nothing but despair and a sickening amount of corn starch.
As we sat there, feeling the poison take root, the hostess passed by, cloaked in a cloud of perfume so overpowering it had more flavor than the food. It was meant to mask the stench of a place that should not be, but it only amplified the corruption. Now, as I write this, I can feel a cold fist of dread tightening in my gut, counting down the minutes until the inevitable reckoning of sweaty toilet time. I am disgusted. Not just by the food, but by the shameful, unholy pact they have made with mediocrity. DO BETTER!!!
