Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Friday, April 29, 2005

I had dinner tonight with a friend at a Chinese restaurant in Brookline that had gotten a good review in the Globe.

The review ends with this: "For a finale we order hot candied apple ($9.95). A bowl of cold water arrives beforehand, followed by the pieces of caramel-coated apple, reshaped to resemble the intact fruit. We're instructed to lift up the pieces on chopsticks and dip them into the water so the sugary coating won't burn us as we bite into them. It's juicy, faintly sweet, and aromatic -- a joyous finish to an evening in Beijing."

So, after reading that, we ordered the hot candied apple for dessert. So it comes, and we start eating. First bite. "Uh, this doesn't taste like apple." "Maybe when you cook an apple for a while, it gets all starchy like that." "No, I don't think so. There's nothing apple about this." "I think we're eating a caramel potato." "This is pretty vile." "Yeah."

So we played with it for a few more minutes, tasted some little pieces, and decided that, yes, we were eating a caramel potato. So we call the waiter over.

"This doesn't taste like apple. It tastes like potato." "Ah, yes, on the menu it says apple, but we do not use apple anymore because apple was too sweet. We use potato. Perhaps I should have told you." Yeah, perhaps.

Lesson: Hot candied potato? Not so tasty. And I'm pretty adventurous and open-minded when it comes to food. (Perhaps only when it comes to food?)

In any case, the rest of the food was okay but nothing extraordinary. Not really worth the subway ride out to Coolidge Corner, although Coolidge Corner is a cool name and made me think we were going to stumble into a production of Our Town, or something like that. (We didn't.)