Do Not Wok

Okay, so, aside from that absolutely terrible pun, I made a pretty big mistake last night. I went to an Italian Chinese restaurant last night. 01/ 16 NEVER FORGET!!!!!!!!

All of the kids in my program were going to go to a certain restaurant, but because we hadn't made a reservation they couldn't take us. We then decided to split up. There's a Chinese restaurant near our program office so, just for funsies, my group decided to go there. Food in Italy is good. Cheap food in Italy is especially good. Chinese food is good. Chinese food is cheap. Ergo, Chinese food in Italy must be good. Right? Right?!

We got to the restaurant and there was a table set for eight. Great! Perfect! There was a "riservato" card on the table, but we just assumed that, like in most restaurants, it was put there to make the restaurant look more popular. And it was plenty popular--almost every table was full. Oh, I had dreams of delicious scallion pancakes and Chinese eggplant in chili sauce and chicken and scallions and and and... Well, we got the menu and none of that was on it. But I noticed that they had veal! Wow! Veal in a Chinese restaurant, how novel. Why don't I get the veal with ginger. Oh, I could just imagine it, veal in brown sauce with scallions and fresh ginger. Well, it took the waiter almost fifteen minutes to take our order. And a half hour to get our drinks. And another half hour to get our appetizers. And another half hour for our food to actually come. And when it finally did come, we almost didn't care what it tasted like. And it tasted like salt and oil. Oil. Tons of it. In the States even shitty Chinese food tastes like something. You know, something other than salt and oil. My dish had salty veal with pickled ginger, because the meat clearly wasn't salty enough. So we paid about six euro (about nine bucks) each for shitty Chinese food and I dare you to find a worse place Stateside.

All was not lost. Because we were all still hungry, we went to a caffe nearby. I got a dessert called a casetta. It's orange sponge cake covered in a layer of cream, wrapped up in a layer of bright green marzipan, and topped with almonds and a maraschino cherry. Heaven in my mouth. I almost forgot about the veal.