Every year on Valentine’s day, fine dinning restaurant are much more busy than usual. I suspect they are even busier than X’mas day or New Year. It seems going out to have a nice dinner with your love one is a fixed program to celebrate the Valentine’s Day. There are more dining options for other festival days. But for Valentine’s day, it gotta be a romantic candle light dinner. Due to the high demand and limited supply of dining space, restaurants know how to rip off their customers on this special day. They will schedule the seating into as many slots as possible. Limit the menu to a few fix dishes to streamline the cooking process. They will also mark up the price in menu to squeeze extra money from the poor guys who have to pay for the meal. That’s why this year I have the Valentine dinner with Pat the day after Valentine to avoid the crowd. Just by shifting the dinner one day, I got better service and the same money can buy a greater value of food. Unfortunately, this tactic only works on your wife or long time girlfriend. For the new couple just started or wanting to start a relationship, delaying the Valentine’s day dinner would make you look really cheap. Or even worse, the girl may raise suspicion that she is only the backup lover, so that you can have dinner with another girl on the Valentine day.
Tag Archives: food
India’s new soft drink
The Japanese had pioneer urine drinking as natural medicine, now the India push the edge eve further, marking a soft drink from cow urine. I can’t believe it is real, but here is what I read form the news, see it yourself at this link. We all know the Hindus think cows are holy. On top of it, according to the news, they think drinking “cow water” can purify your soul. Cow urine and dung are actually consumed by some Hindus in religious rituals. Although the new soft drink is made of cow urine, it is filtered clean and added herbs medicines. Apparently, the company claims it tastes good and very healthy. For those who will travel to India, I dare you to try a bottle of this new soft drink. Next time when I travel to India, I will definitely bring back a few bottle back home. What a perfect gift!
Fruit manual
Nowadays, even fruit come with a user manual. I went to grocery shopping at Superstores and come across a weird looking fruit, Pomegranate. It is red in color, in the shape of an onion, looks like a decoration ball on a X’mas tree. I have no idea what it is, how it tastes or even how to eat it. To my surprise, the fruit come with a user manual. The food producer printed a nice pamphlet answering all my questions and place them next to the fruit. From the pamphlet, I know pomegranate suppose to be very healthy, it has lots of antioxidants and Vitamin C. There are illustrations in the pamphlet show me how to eat a pomegranate step by step. You are not actually eating the fruit, you are eating the seeds inside fruit. After you cut open the pomegranate, you have to loose the arils (seeds) from the membrane attached to the skin and then pour the arils through a strainer to remove any remaining liquid. We bought one home, but I don’t know it taste yet. I am waiting for Pat to open a pomegranate. I would never buy one if there is no user manual. I feel more comfortable trying new things if I can read some related information first. Maybe all odd looking fruits in the supermarket should have a user manual too, so I know what to try.
Dinner plan
I am the unofficial Bangalore food guide. Whenever I am in town, I will take care of dinner arrangement for everyone staying in the guest house. It does not take much time, but the return is great. I only have to spent 5 minutes every day to pick the restaurant, make the reservation, print direction and sent out an email invite people to join me for dinner. People are glad that some one is take care of the dinner arrangement, they can hop into the car and guarantee a nice meal. I always pick the expensive restaurants, so that it can never go wrong. It’s a fun to have some colleagues to chat and chill out with a few drinks. It is far better than the alternative. If no one organize dinner, we may end up eating at Indian restaurants around the guest house every night.
Somehow, some colleagues choose to cook for themselves in the guest house instead of joining us. I don’t quite understand why don’t they come with us. Granted, the restaurants are far away, it takes time to stuck in traffic. However, buying glocery, washing and cooking also takes time. Having a nice dinner doesn’t take much time than cooking. Money is not a concern, the food bill is paid by the companies anyways. There is no reason to go cheap on food by making your own dinner. I just can’t imagine someone can have sausage and egg every day instead of fine dinner. One theory why they stay home for dinner is they feel guilt spending company’s money. I tried to enlighten them with the correct value of money. The company outsource to India to cut cost, so we are just helping the company utilize some of saving by having nice dinner in India.
Indian and beef
When I worked in India, I made friends to a few colleagues in the Bangalore office. They shown me show me around town on weekends and we had lots of fun together. One of them is visiting Vancouver for work, so it is my turn to be the host and show him the city. We had a welcome lunch with other team member at Cactus Club today. This friend of mine is a rare Indian because he eat beef. He is the one brought me to try the illegal off-menu Indian deep fry beef in Bangalore. We recommended him to have steak for lunch. At first he wanted have the steak well done, luckily we stopped him or his steak would be like shoe leather. It would taste best with medium-rare, but we afraid he may not like the blood juice, so we ordered him a medium instead. This is his first time travel outside of India, so this is his first time to have a real steak. He like the steak a lot and complain that he could not find such a good steak in India.
When I was in India, I told him about my guns and I promise to bring him shooting when he come over. So tonight we went to shooting range after work. Due to various delay, we had dinner at McDonald to save time. It turns out having a hamburger in McDonald is a new experience to him. The McDonald in India don’t serve hamburger, they only have chicken, fish or veggie burger. The funny thing is somehow he think hamburger is made of ham instead of beef. I have to explain to him hamburger is not made of ham. The name comes form where it is invented, which is Hamburg, Germany. Other than serving hamburger, our McDonald is pretty much the same as the Indian McDonald. The next food I will get him to try is sushi. He still haven’t overcome the idea of eating raw fish. I guess we should start with California roll then slowly work the way up to sashimi. It is always fun introducing new cuisine to people from different culture, whether he like the food or not.