It only seems fitting that my first entry about Sydney should be about Chinese restuarants.
Anyone who has attended a Sydney high-school knows that the class roll tends to get strangely bloated from W onward. According to statistics I just made up, there are a helluva lot of "people of asian descent" in Australia. Tinny-voiced talkback radio callers named Ireiyne (pronounced like "Irene") may say that they're ruining the country but this is not true. In fact i'd wager that Ireiyne is probably just jealous of their fine cuisine and graceful aging. They are a kind and cultured race.. and really abundant!
Today I was out with my "friend of Chinese descent" at a "restaurant of Chinese descent". This was in Chinatown which has dozens of great, cheap places for lunch but this particular eatery, Daniang, did not follow suit. Maybe that's because it was right on the corner of where Chinatown meets the rest of Sydney. $8.50 bought a plate of fried rice, a cold dish of choice and a can of Coke. This wouldn't have been so bad if the quality was of a decent standard.
The "cold dish of choice" turned out to be hilariously ironic as the selection ranged from pig tongue to some sort of tentacle. I chose the pig tongue (above) to be experimental. Plus, since watching that Pig-testicle eating competition on Big Brother, I had been feeling quite incomplete from a lack of unconventional porcine by-products in my diet.
I'm all for the diversity of cultures and whatnot and maybe I would have enjoyed eating the tongue of a pig more if it hadn't been sweating on the plate in front of me. Not even the sprinking of vegetable matter could soak up this strange moisture, but in spite of its appearance and slippery texture, I was still able to get a piece of tongue into my mouth. The feeling of having something else's whole dismembered mouth organ colliding with my own was a bizarre sensation. It was like kissing.. Babe.. the Babe that couldn't take direction on the set. If this wasn't odd enough, it was extremely chewy and each bite released an explosion of salty, tangy liquid down my throat with a mild burning sensation. My asian friend was watching and laughing at my suffering. I'm not sure why.. it's her country's native delicacy.
That was the entree, I couldn't bring myself to eat more than two. The main dish was fried rice, that's good and average, right? It looked okay on the plate in front of me but after one bite I tasted the secret ingredient, oil. It wasn't so much the secret ingredient as the ONLY ingredient.
Picture from Daniang website of the fried rice dish.
Actual picture taken by me of the fried rice dish.
As the rice began to cool down the taste of the oil got stronger and the colour became more and more yellow. At this point I was too afraid to even try the coke for fear it was actually a can of petrol. Overall, I wouldn't visit Daniang again but the staff were very friendly and I for one appreciate that there's a place to obtain pig tongue in daylight.