在地道的北京饭馆吃饭的经历

Yesterday I experienced eating dinner at one of the weirdest, though most authentic Beijing restaurants I have ever been to.

A group of my friends were initially supposed to go to San Li Tun (a very touristy bar street) for one of my friend's birthday. She turned 21 today, but we wanted to surprise her with some good Americanized Mexican food, who knows, maybe a hamburger. Though we all know that these foods come with the American price tag as well.

So, later on at night, it turns out that our friend, whose birthday it was , was at the airport dropping off her siblings so she couldn't make it. After hearing this news, a bunch of us lost interest in traveling anywhere to eat and more than half of us decided to go get dumplings at the nearby dumpling restaurant, the default to any "where should we go to eat?" question.

Derrick, being the only Thai friend we have at EAP, suggested that we go to find Thai food. After looking online for about 10 minutes, we found a place that said cheap dishes for around 20 kuai a dish, roughly $3 US. This sounded like such a great idea since the majority of other Thai restaurants charged about 100 kuai a head.

After deciding, we take a cab and head towards Wudaokou, the area of the restaurant. We have the taxi driver talk to the restaurant attendant because we didn't exactly know the directions. After finding it and stopping at the destination, we looked around in all locations next to the "DVD store" that they man said was next to the restaurant.

We finally found it, it was this strange, dirty hole in the wall, and true to his words, it was next to a DVD store, a sleazy one at that (which we found out later by going in). We went down this narrow, dark, smelly corridor, expecting anything. We see a small shop with no chairs or tables to eat and no A/C. The man greeted us only after Derrick had seen the Thai writing on the walls and the familiar pictures of Thai dishes.

There were four of us and Derrick felt sorry to both parties. He understood why we wanted to leave, so suggested that he just order a small dish for himself and we leave to get other food. After deciding this and talking to a very happy restaurant employee, he led us even further down this corridor, which sloped downhill. The hall got darker and darker until he showed us a place called "Ganji", not the original name of the restaurant we saw on the website called "Pad Thai". We went in and he was still very welcoming, showing us a larger room, with very few lights on. All 4 of us sat down at a circular table and the fuwuyuan immediately brought us nice Olympic logo cups and a pitcher of baikaishui (tap water, stuff you don't drink here). After standing for about 10 seconds, the man that led us down to the restaurant promptly sat down at the table with us, asking us questions about where we were from, if we all knew Thai, what we were doing in Beijing, just the normal casual talk. It turns out that there are a lot of Thai people, but not very many Thai restaurants.

We all decided to say, agreeing that eating at the restaurant would be a very memorable experience. Oh, I forgot to mention that all of us were from Berkeley, so we all talked about how much we missed home and how eating at this rather fancy hole in the wall would be an experience we would always remember, even going back to the US.

So let me describe this new "Ganji" restaurant in detail. We sat down in an area, where the only light was showing from the back "kitchen-looking" area and a light above our heads. The rest of the restaurant, which was dark because none of the lights showed included an expensive looking projector and a screen. This placed look so much more fancy and expensive than we thought it should have, only because there were no other customers in the entire restaurant. The place was staffed entirely by the one guy and two other fuwuyuan that were just sitting behind a counter. Whenever they would come to bring us Sprite or water, they would speak in the softest tone, not saying anything more than what they needed to say.

While we were talking about the place, we noticed that it wasn't a bad room. There was an abundance of chairs and very hip decorations. We came to the conclusion that the downstairs restaurant was a front for illegal Thai drug activities or human trading. Just as we were talking about that and the movie "Infernal Affairs" we heard very loud giggling in the back. Wondering where it came from, we agreed that it was probably a brothel in the back.

After waiting about 15 minutes after we ordered and thinking that they might poison us or make us sick, the food, which turned out to be much more expensive than advertised on the website, was good and very authentic tasting. Derrick, who has been eating Thai food all his life, was even the first one to say it was "bomb", which in his words means REALLY GOOD (好吃). Anyway, the food was very good, though spicy, as we had ordered it.

The guy who greeted us had disappeared and the two dishes that we ordered had already come, though not from the place that we thought was the kitchen, but rather from the front door. The kitchen was elsewhere. However, while we were eating and also while we were waiting we would hear shreiking noises from the back of the "kitchen-looking" room. This grinding noise made us worried that we got into some bad kind of business. We never did find out what it was, but after we had the meal, which turned out to be 100 kuai for all of us, we were very satisfied and even mentioned that we would order delivery, after all, the place was supposed to be known for the delivery, not the restaurant.

After, we went to the DVD store and talked about how it was an experience we couldn't have passed up, but next time we might try a more legit looking place.