Number One Chinese: Worst Restaurant 2006

See here if you haven’t been following this contest

Introduction

I’d like to preface this review with a warning. Neither Anne, Walker, nor Smith2D2 thought that Number One Chinese was as bad as I did. While I sat there thinking of ways to describe the food in terms you would find in a garbage can in Todd MacFarlane’s office labeled “too stupid,” they gave me blank looks and said things like “It… tastes like sweet and sour sauce.”

I was pretty embarrassed. But let me make one thing clear: I call them like I see them. When I say that the restaurant looks like an AmTrak car crashed into the back of an iPod store in which hobos had taken residence, that is how I honestly remember the restaurant. Even things like accusing the sweet and sour sauce of being kool-aid spiked with Chinese chili peppers are backed up with my notes, taken on-the-spot. Again, nobody else at the table got that vibe, but I’m sure nobody else at that table had a dream last night about renting paper clips to Christy Carlson Romano.

If any of this makes you wonder about my journalistic integrity, I’d like to say that

1. I am not a journalist
2. I will sell out at any time, any place, any price, and
3. Probably Taco Ninja really isn’t that bad, you should give it a try.

No no, I’m sorry, don’t actually do that last one. Let’s never fight again, okay?

The main problem of this review (that I believe a writer’s job is to lie 100% of the time and it’s the job of the editor to cut slander out until it becomes watered-down truth (and also I have the maturity of a fourteen year-old)) is compounded by my lack of any kind of reliable memory. I typically have problems remembering my girlfriends’ birthdates, what people look like, and what I’m supposed to be avoiding doing at work. Last night this went into overdrive, and I can think of at least three cases where I can remember the beginning of someone’s sentence, but not the end. (Confidential to Smith2D2: I seem to remember proposing to you and I need to know if we’re engaged. My mom asked. thanks!)

So what I’m trying to get at is this review should be looked upon as more of a documentation of my disease than as an actual review of services rendered. In other words, anyone reading from Number One Chinese you have no legal recourse against me.

Also one final note–Walker, if you’re reading this, the Han dynasty lasted from 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD.

The Good: Large portions, they bring the food to your table

The Bad: Large portions of nothing worth eating, the food brought to your table isn’t in any way “good.”

THE ATMOSPHERE

Number One Chinese’s main decorating scheme is grime on tile. Like any good artwork, it has a subtle rising action to a visual climax. Take, for example, the Disaster Transport ride at Cedar Point.

If ITEC Productions Inc. hadn’t bothered to paint the outside of the building like a warehouse, or decorate the queueing area with space junk from the year 40,000, how excited would you be when the fully-lit mannequin finally speaks his fateful words: “DISPATCH MASTER TRANSPORT I’M LOSING CONTROLLL!!!”?

Not very.

In this case, Number One Chinese’s aura begins about 15 feet away from the restaurant itself, when the sidewalk begins to tilt and become covered with rolling paper garbage. Now, yes, this does describe 80% of High Street near campus. But it’s only the beginning, as Number One includes dirty glass, poorly maintained signage, and whatever the fuck this is in their external design.

The inside isn’t much better. Oddly enough, the designers of Number One Chinese decided to make the entire front of the store a glass wall. This affords the patron a good look at oncoming traffic, but makes you feel like you’re in some kind of barrel and could fall out at any moment.

Indeed, the building seems designed to move you backwards, expelling you out of the same smudged glass door from which you tried to enter.

One wall of the restaurant is mirrored, echoing the ancient splendor of Versailles-esque palaces. Except instead of a bunch of rich people wearing gowns what you see is yourself with a bunch of college students eating bad food that you don’t really even want as your life slips away.

Note the TV. If you need to watch the news this might be a good place for you.

Chairs and tables are curved, featureless cherry-red plastic laminate over chipboard–a style made popular during the Han dynasty and popular with traditionalists to this day. One can almost picture a civil servant scholar, his robes flowing over his elbows as he leans on the table (causing it to stutter and shake–did I also mention the tables are earthquake-proof in the same way that skyscrapers are earthquake-proof?), discussing the relative merits of wu-wei with a venerable old philosopher, his long-stemmed pipe melting through the thin veneer and scorching the pressed sawdust that makes up the majority of the furniture.

One of the recommendations in feng shui is to put the bathroom as far from the kitchen as possible. In fact, that’s a good idea in general, even if you don’t believe that chi is going to get caught up in the pipes and wash away. The bathroom in Number One Chinese could not be closer to the kitchen unless they were physically coincident. In fact, that entire quarter of the restaurant is some kind of oubliette, holding the trashcan and some empty cardboard boxes.

Really guys, come on. You don’t have like a dumpster out back or something? I mean, the building is three stories tall, I don’t know what you’re doing with the rest of that space, but I have to imagine there’s somewhere else you could be storing your old fortune cookie boxes.

To illustrate how ugly this trash container is, I decided to recreate it using the world’s most prolific producer of ugly graphics: Microsoft PowerPoint.

WHOAH!! AM I SEEING DOUBLE?????

Okay, so I think that about wraps up the atmosphere, and I–

I almost forgot about that one.

You know, in the spirit of fairness that’s probably some kind of resin glue used to hold the decoration on the wall. But I’m no wall construction epoxy engineer; all I know is it looks gross and represents how haphazard and slapdash the entire interior is.

THE FOOD

Due to Number One’s location, I’m sure you know that everything leading up to this section is just a meaningless warm-up. College students are not picky about decor. Hell, I’m willing to bet 50% of them wouldn’t even be able to correct me about the proper accenture to have been used in the word “decor.” Like my friend used to say, “If the eatin’s good, who cares what the girl looks like?” Although now that I think about it, that might have been some roundabout way of referring to oral sex.

So much like The Eliminator in American Gladiators this section obviates the need for everything that came before it. And this is fortunate for Number One Chinese.

What’s unfortunate for Number One is that they absolutely fail in this section as well.

Round 1: Crab Rangoon

Anne’s crab rangoon looked pale and soggy, like an anemic chillygirls.com model(NSFW). They didn’t appear to have been fried so much as “thawed,” but touching them got your skin greasy. Really greasy. I seem to have been the only one unnerved by this, but I think it’s a legitimate point for concern.

The sweet and sour dipping sauce came in a too-large industrial plastic tub that looked like it was left over from something. The sauce itself looked watery, and lacked any kind of sour taste. Instead, “acrid” was substituted for sour, and the whole mess tasted like a melted cherry Jolly Rancher.

Crab Rangoon is, as usual, an adulterated cream cheese. In this case, the adulteration is to add roughly a whole bag of powdered sugar. Instead of any crab taste however, the crab rangoon has only a slight hint of the ocean; an essence if you will. The same common element that the taste of all seafood shares with the air around the docks. It’s a weird and unsettling taste.

Round 2: Pepper Steak

The first thing Walker did when receiving his pepper steak was to drizzle an entire packet of hot sauce on it. I was pretty sure that this was cheating. However, the joke was on me–even with the added hot peppers, the steak tasted like no pepper whatsoever. It was chewy, and it was salty, but the title “pepper steak” is–at most–only half right.

Round 3: Tofu + Vegetable Stir-Fry

Smitty got this one, and immediately observed that the baby corn was “fresh”–

Sorry, she didn’t actually say it like that. But that was the gist. By the time she had finished, she had upgraded her “top two favorite things” about the meal to include the water chestnuts. So if you like baby corn and water chestnuts, you should get on over to Number One Chinese and–who am I even kidding, just stay home and eat canned baby corn and water chestnuts.

I was “forced” to eat the tofu, and I didn’t like it at all. This turned out to be a fair trade though, because the rest of the table didn’t like my suggested description of it. And yeah, I’ll admit that I hate tofu in general. I never ever eat it. This is in keeping with Jim’s Food Rule Number Five, and that is “beans are not to be used as anything but beans.” That means no soy ‘milk,’ no soy ‘lent,’ and no tofu.

Biting into the tofu gave just the littlest bit of resistance, while the inside was soft and gritty, kind of like if Circus Peanuts had that kind of cancer that causes them to grow sacs of teeth all over (warning gross picture). Or, wait no! Even better! It’s as if Kirby had been subjected to some kind of Inquisition “don’t break the skin” torture and had all his bones pulverized inside his body and then you ate him. Covered in some kind of hoisin sauce.

I described the experience as akin to eating a diaper.

Round 4: Pork Egg Fu Yung

I had two reasons for ordering this. One, I like egg fu yung. Two, it was the grossest-looking thing on the menu, and three, I figured if anything was going to give me some kind of illness, it would be the dish with pork and egg.

Number One Chinese passed that test with flying colors though, because I am as healthy as I ever am! Because of that, I decided to award them the Columbus Underground “Good Housekeeping Guarantee of It Won’t Make You Sick and Die.” I don’t want to get into the legal battle that ensued with Good Housekeeping, mostly because it’s just an excuse for me to not have to make a graphic for the stupid fake award.

The Pork Egg Fu Yung tastes like onion and potato. If it wasn’t kind of floppy and rubbery, you might confuse it for a latke. Smith said it was like a really watered-down omelette, and to be honest I couldn’t even taste the “omelette” part. The “watered-down” I can absolutely agree with, though.

I had a bit of the pork on its own: chewy and tasteless. Bleh.

It looks like rubber vomit, but so does every other egg fu yung dish. Note the included sauce.

I also got rice and an egg roll and another industrial tub, this time full of some kind of mustard/peanut sauce. It actually didn’t really taste like either one of those, just like it was trying to. What kind of sauce was it? All I know is it scarred over with a thick elephantine skin every 30 seconds.

I didn’t much care for how sweet the egg roll was, but I never do. I’m leaving it out in a too-late attempt at evenhandedness.

Where Number One really let me down was the rice. White rice. I know some of you are already thinking “white rice is tasteless anyway, so who cares?” I understand, and you can skip this next part. Probably I will get a lot of emails telling me that I am expecting Japanese-style rice from a Chinese restaurant, that rice is a stupid thing to even review, and that I am gay. But this is an important topic for me when it comes to asian food (also I am totally not gay–who told you that???)

Good rice is cooked just long enough so that it is sticky and starchy and the sugars just begin to caramelize. One of the best things about white rice is the glaze it begins to make for itself if cooked long enough with little enough water.

Number One’s rice is long-grain (aka “boring”), it is dry, it is flavorless, and it is impossible to eat with chopsticks.

At Number One Chinese, you will receive an amount of rice approximately equal to the volume of your main course. There is absolutely no reason for you to eat this. You may as well have warm shredded napkins in water, or astronaut ice cream.

Total

No matter what you end up ordering at Number One, you probably won’t end up finishing it. That’s not to say the portions are too big; they’re perfectly-sized. But the portion size doesn’t matter: The food there just has an incredible ability to instill ennui and boredom. You will come in hungry, you will eat until you don’t want to eat any more, and you will leave still hungry. If you’re anything like Anne and Walker and I, you’ll go to Buckeye Donuts afterwards and eat two or three donuts. The part of the meal where we went and got donuts was the best part of my Number One experience.

MISCELLANEOUS

I wanted to get a picture of the bathroom because hey, maybe there was something funny in there (there was: someone had written “FUCK” on the wall, and again on the door. If there’s a lamer, more hilarious thing to graffiti, I don’t know about it), but the light was out. There’s no lightswitch, the exposed bulb had just burned out. Keep that in mind if you need to do anything in there that requires the door being shut.

I was a hair’s width away from throwing out my plastic tub of whatever sauce when Anne stopped me. In the gray tupperware tub where they collect used (ceramic) plates, there was also a stack of half-full neon-colored-sauce tubs. I slowly placed mine with the rest, and turned to Anne. “No.” I thought “Oh god, no.” I had been assuming that Number One Chinese used the grossest sauce vessels I had ever seen because they were what the sauces came in. Or… you know, something, anything. No. They re-use those sauce tubs, and you’d better hope that their dishwasher is strong enough to wipe out the taste of the previous sauces, and the bits of food dunked in there, and whatever else could have and probably did go into your tub.

JimL2 to Walker wrote Hey you know what I just realized, we didn’t get fortune cookies!!

Walker to JimL2 wrote Yeah, what kind of Chinese Place doesn’t give you stale fortune cookies…

Smith pointed out that the food at Number One was like low-grade Mexicanese: a term she uses to describe Chinese restaurants entirely staffed by Latinos.

Sadly, however, Number One Chinese is staffed by what appears to be a hard-working Chinese family. The mother is cooking while the daughter takes orders and serves food. We were treated politely and promptly, and received exactly what we ordered at a fair market price. From the moment we stepped foot into the restaurant, all four of us felt bad about what it was we had to do. The plaque must be delivered, the readers’ wills must be made manifest.

I took this picture of Walker looking at the plaque I had taken two weeks to make with a mixture of enjoyment and moral conflict. Anne hasn’t yet realized that I plan on giving this to the friendly owner-operator waitstaff, and is still laughing about what an idiot I am. Smith is not pictured, I think because it turns out she’s a vampire.

Number One Chinese had failed us in every respect. Not only was it not good, it wasn’t even bad. It was hard to take issue with it, to insult these people who (I guess) were trying their hardest and still failing. Like a lot of things in life, Number One Chinese is just totally mediocre and depressing.

We ended up leaving the plaque lying face-down on the table and walking out. I have visions of a crying young Asian girl that I will never console. I can never return to Number One Chinese. And perhaps things are better that way, for both of us.

Not pictured: John Wayne riding off into the sunset

CONCLUSION

$0/$whatever = 0%

There is no reason to eat here.