Bewildered

In the last decade or so, Asian cuisine has really become the norm in magazines, TV, and on the table. It's flavorful, you get our Omega-3s, it's exotic, bla bla bla. Chinese and Japanese food of course but Korean and Vietnamese cooking have exploded in popularity. Thai food is even being considered the new romantic "it" cuisine. It's everywhere!

This is why when I get the occasional customer who has NO idea what anything on the menu is, I'm just as flabbergasted as they are. I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm not saying people have to know everything there is to know about foreign cuisine but this isn't Moroccan or Finnish food (only examples I can think of. See, I don't know what's totally obscure these days).

A couple nights ago, I had a three top of girls. The first two ordered without even looking at the menu. The last one hesitated because she wanted to ask me some questions before she made a decision. The questions though, I was not expecting:

"What is Fried Rice? Is it deep fried because I don't want all that. Oh and the Egg Drop soup, how are the eggs? Are they hard boiled?"

How has this girl gotten through roughly twenty years of her life without ever coming in contact with fried rice or egg drop soup? Fried rice is literally everywhere! It appears in many episodes of Law & Order in the form of takeout and there were a couple episodes dedicated to Chinese food in Sex and the City.

Her assumptions are so..literal! I wonder what she thinks about General Tso's Chicken...chicken belonging to a General Tso? Come on!