Yellow Peril: Mt Roskill Will Take Over the World Part III: Back to the Future
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One time, I ordered french toast from a hotel cafe in Hong Kong, and got what appeared to be a deep-fried peanut-butter sandwich with golden syrup drizzled over top.
You know, there are probably people who think that sounds like a good thing ...
This morning cholesterol jolt - aka Hong Kong 'French Toast' - happens to be Keith Ng's favourite breakfast in the whole wide world. He seeks it wherever he senses yellow people.
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Wow, how uncultivated am I! If I take any more holidays to exotic countries, I'll be sure to look up all the local delicacies before I go, so I know what I'm ordering. Things like "baked beans" and "omelette".
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Like I said, it's not really the white customers who directly ask people to dilute recipes or ruin menus *on the whole* (although I *can* cast some specific blame on certain dishes in certain restaurants being rendered totally inedible because of the Pakeha requests for them to be served with ever more oyster sauce dolloped on top, or other fundamentalist favourites of the actual ethnic community being represented disappearing due to complaints about the 'smell').
Or the inexplicable preference to random stuff drenched in sweet-and-sour sauce made using industrial process.
I for one will celebrate the day I see a stall/shop selling deep-fried stinky tofu here, or rather smell from hundreds of meters away...
Ultimately, these are the choices of the chefs/restaurateurs themselves and reflect their compromises and expectations of what the market will respond to when it has 'ethnic' in mind (seemingly volume, coconut cream, deep fried things, mildness, and lots of salt and sugar notes).
However that doesn't explain declining standard of dim-sim in Chinese restaurants - for example the badly made glutinous rice pastry too thick to be steamed through yet will self-destruct on contact with chopsticks. Given the hour+ wait required to get tables on weekends the only conclusion is that the people running the show are too busy raking it in to care.
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Or the inexplicable preference to random stuff drenched in sweet-and-sour sauce made using industrial process.
Oh God, New Zealand's odd affection for dodgy sweet-and-sour sauce. That goes back a way. The night of our senior ball, my date and I went to The Chinese Restaurant In Christchurch That All The White Folks Went To and ate battered meat drenched in sticky red sauce. We felt quite sophisticated.
But this is country where dining out bordered on the illegal for decades.We really knew how to fuck up food, and we merrily fucked up some of the finest raw ingredients in the world.
Before it all changed, Dunedin was generally your best bet for Chinese dining, although I was introduced to both Malaysian and sashimi (and wasabi!!) in Christchurch, by my girlfriend's bohemian intellectual American parents. There wasn't a Japanese restaurant, so they served the sashimi at home, with wasabi brought back from Auckland, I think.
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I've noticed since moving back from Korea that several of the 'asian' restaurants that we have been to in Auckland are owned and operated by Koreans. Not quite sure how authentic they are. I'm not picky enough to bother finding out though. Tastes all good.
Try finding decent 'western' food in Korea though. It's western food to suit Koreans. Coleslaw drowned in mayonaise and tomato sauce. The Korean restaurants in Auckland are all good (ones I've been to anyway) because the majority of their customers are Koreans either living in Auckland or passing through on package tours.
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One time, I ordered french toast from a hotel cafe in Hong Kong
"I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance."
Steve Wright
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Tze Ming, I've just realised, one of our registered users proudly displays his residence as "Hamilton - City of the Future".
Does that mean you'll have to fight him for Roskill honour? My money would, of course, be on you.
I'm trying to work out whether my Ham-town street-cred would go up or down if Tze Ming gave me the Roskill bash. Probably the bonus points for being pasted by an asian chick would be cancelled out by the shame of being beaten up by a JAFA...
Nah, I'm happy to update my location - how does "Hamilton - the future was so last week" sound?
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merc,
Too much concentration on the stimulation of the five senses alone, leads to decadence of mind and soul.
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Y'know, ever since NZ Post cruelly changed Hamilton's postcode from 2000 to 3200, it hasn't quite felt like the same city of the future.
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I dunno, 3200 is a lot more futuristic than 2000. 2K is more a retro flashback kind of vibe now.
I'm just ever so grateful to NZ post that they very kindly made my code 3210, otherwise I'd never remember it. Now if only they'd change the 3 to a 90...
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I know I'm late and all, but Manukau has called itself the official "face of the future" for quite some time. Since perhaps 1999, or some other time in the distant past...
Pacifico-Asian sprawling suburbs might not be as cool as the melting pot Roskill-Albert-Sandringham hyperspace continuum, but like an evil empire, Manukau has the advantage of being able to expand in every dimension.
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It's nice to know I'm living in the Suburb of the Future - especially as the extreme roadworks, lack of cafes and the relentless loud parties at the house on the corner every farking weekend are getting me down.
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