that's good eating

We've had much good eating lately. On Sunday we had dim sum with D. and S., at China One in south Durham. It was our second time there, and I think we only repeated one dish between the two visits. D. and S. are much more experienced with dim sum than I am, so I appreciated their advice on what to get. Only one dish was less than wonderful: the roast pork (char-siu) was cold, which made the fatty parts a bit tough. Everything else was outstanding. I particularly liked a little dumpling filled with pork and leeks, and another dumpling filled with shrimp, corn and carrots. We ate quite a lot of dumplings now that I think about it.

Occasionally I had trouble understanding the waiters well enough to know what a dish was, but every time we asked for something they understood us well enough to find it for us (excepting red bean paste buns, which they were sadly out of). We noticed a couple of carts which were only going to the tables with Chinese customers: one with chicken feet and beef tendon (and probably other things but those were the only two I heard identified), and one which I think had congee (rice porridge) and tripe soup. The staff judged us well: we all agreed that we didn't want any of those dishes.

My only criticism of the service was the pacing. All the carts seemed to come at us at once, and we didn't want the food to get cold. So we only took a few things at first, passing over others that we still wanted, just not at that moment. We kept saying "not yet" but they must have thought we meant we were full, because later in the meal it was hard to get them to come back. I would have preferred fewer carts approaching us at the beginning and then not having to flag them down later on.

I work with a guy who lived in Taiwan for a couple of years, and I asked him how to say "come back in 10 minutes" in Chinese. He couldn't remember how to say "minute" so he taught me "come back in 10 hours" and left it to me to look up "minute." He said it was a literal translation and probably not at all what a Chinese person would say in that situation. I think that's for the best. Because, although it's been a long time, I did speak Mandarin pretty well at one point, and my accent is still ... well not great, probably not even good at this point. But still better than someone who never studied the language. And so if I knew the correct idiom, I would sound like I actually knew how to speak Chinese, and then they would try to talk to me, and I wouldn't understand them at all, and that would be embarrassing for everyone. I think I'm better off knowing a clunky, awkward phrase that still gets the message across.