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Food VIII – Home Made

Food VII – Nan Jing Chinese Restaurant - Bucharest

 

On their website, Nan Jing Chinese Restaurant advertise themselves as the first Chinese Restaurant ever opened in Romania. I can’t contradict them on that, but I can contradict them on pretty much everything else they say about themselves on that website.

The food was a poor imitation of Chinese cuisine (the duck and bamboo shoots was especially disappointing, as was the fact that they brought us pork instead of beef in another dish). The noodles were overcooked and rather resembled porridge rather than rice noodles. Even the soy sauce on the tables tasted funny (I suspect they mixed it with vinegar, for some strange reason!).

I had to ask for chopsticks especially, but soon gave up using them, as there weren’t any bowls to eat from, but only flat plates.

The waiter behaved as if we were disturbing his evening (but then again, most waiters and waitresses normally act that way in Romania!), he spoke no English and seemed extremely reluctant to bring us a couple of deserts from listed in the menu, claiming that the strawberries were not ‘Romanian strawberries’ and therefore ‘yuk!’ – and he made a face to demonstrate his disgust! When we insisted and he finally brought the ice-cream with whipped cream and strawberries, it turned out there was no whipped cream and no strawberries on it, just a red strawberry sauce from a tube!

Oh! And the funnies part was that, according to the website, the ‘modern Chinese atmosphere’ is created by the Chinese pop music softly playing in the background. I never knew Elvis, The Everly Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel were all Chinese! Haha!

I could go on and on about this, but what’s the point? I’ll never go back there and that settles the matter. Some of the food actually looked good, so see below a few photos of the soups, the caramel bananas and the lychees:

   

Food VI - Cyprus

 

 

Food V - The Story of a Pizza in Sicily

First, you go to Sicily.

Then you find a restaurant with a hot pizza oven and order a pizza each.

Then you go watch ‘the best pizzaiolo in Sicily’ and take lots of self-explanatory photos while he is trying to chat you up in a Sicilian dialect which resembles Romanian so much, you have to wonder if the Romans invaded the Dacians or the other way around…

        

You obtain:

una pizza bufala con zucchini…

e una pizza capricciosa senza zucchini…  

You accompany the pizza with another Sicilian legend:

… or with a bottle of something more refined, unless a blonde nymph steals it from you before you get a chance…

… and you stuff your face…

…until you get to the last piece and you feel you are going to explode if you so much as smell it…

 

 

 

 

 

…but you just know you will regret it as soon as you walk out of that restaurant, so you just cannot bring yourself to leave it there…

… and then you roll all the way home kicking yourself for not having stopped before that last slice.