Thursday, January 15, 2009

Aaaaand I'm back...

So, its been a while since I've posted on this blog. It was getting to be too much trouble. I always wanted to try a place before I blogged about it. Then, I'd forget to take the pictures before grubbing down. It was just too much to pick only good places. So, I was just going to stop and let this blog sit. So, I did. It has sat untouched for a while now. But, the nagging desire to blog about food just kept getting louder. And, finally, it got me. So, here I am. And, here we go. Now, I will be covering both good and bad places. So, the layout will be a little different.

My first place I am covering on this restart is Chanoodle in downtown Manhattan in Chinatown. It's a small place that we've avoided for a long time due to the lack of Asians in the whenever we passed by. But, we've always been curious. So, the other weekend we decided to take the dive.

We tried: Beef Chow Fun and Two Kinds of Chinese Sausage Fried Rice. (pictured to the left)

The good: There's not much to say here. I think the only saving grace of this place is that their food was not bad. And, they had some unique dishes. The serving sizes were not bad.

The bad: The prices were a bit high for Chinatown. They supposedly had drinks other than soda, but didn't have them for that day. The service is bad even by Chinatown standards. I usually don't mind the service in Chinatown. I rather like the "to the point" style of service in Chinatown. But, this place was bad. We had a male waiter. He was just grumpy the whole time. And, by the end of our meal, he was sitting down eating his lunch... What the hell is that? They had other waiters there, but they seemed pretty useless too. I informed one of the waitresses that we wanted to take some food home. She passed our table about 5 times empty handed before she realized she forgot about us. THEN, some more time passed and she brought us the check... and asked if we wanted to take the rest of our food home... What the hell? Isn't that like the memory of a gold fish? Turn around and your memory resets. And, finally, the price was a bit much. For the same monies, we could have gone to another place and gotten two dishes, drinks, and maybe a side, and still had change.

Final word: Food is not bad, but not worth the aggravation of dealing with incompetent servers. The food that's not bad can be found in other Chinatown places made much better. I'd recommend making your way farther into Chinatown and exploring other food options. Many places will be better than this place.