This is a tale of cold egg fried rice, slimy noodles and a waitress worth her weight in thin air.
It’s a tragedy that begins with the unappetizing smell of detergent as my sister and I amble in under the beautiful Chinese lanterns, past the quiet grey parrot and into Yang Tze Chinese Restaurant where we will spend a pitiful portion of life waiting decades for chicken wings and all but begging for fortune cookies before being wooed by contrite managers.
The moral of the story, if I may jump to the end, is: Order takeaway.
If it’s an early Sunday evening and you find yourself beguiled by the bustling bar, the decorative white table cloths, the festive private dining rooms and the ornate fool’s gold ceiling, do yourself a favour and join the rush of people collecting their meals to go because you’ll soon come to find they know a thing or two about life.
Life without a waitress trained at the Acme Academy of the Apathetic, I mean.
Life in which you won’t have your sizzling beef delivered without sizzle because your waitress is chatting away in reception with her comrades in minimum wage instead of hustling in a world full of tips.
Life without a woman so forgetful she omits to place your order of chicken wings and so does so only après interrogation and with a thinly-veiled gasp of guilt when you’re tucking into arctic slivers of bland beef and green pepper lathered over cool egg fried rice.
Life, dare I say, in which you don’t wait 15 minutes for two fortune cookies which you can spy languishing in a bright red jar at the till while your waitress giggles with her gal pals not 10 metres away. All fortunes forgotten.
And then delivered by hand on a plate before the manager says that’s pretty much the worst thing you can do with the supernatural snack.
Instead, one must reach into the jar and pick one’s own fate and certainly not lay claim to the disaster delivered by a waitress who’ll end up apologising sincerely after her manager has sent over a pacifying plate of fried coconut milk and custard.
Conciliatory custard aside, the service in the main restaurant is terrible and a far cry from the fast and friendly experience of ordering your food at reception which sees a steady stream of customers popping in out of the cold before dashing back to blanket.
Given the menu’s extensive boast of Peking Duck, beef black pepper, dumplings, sake and pages upon pages more, it’s a pity.
What is a less of a problem are Yang Tze Chinese Restaurant’s chicken wings.
Crisp, salty, ample and amazing, their chicken wings are a firm favourite of eat-in and takeaway clients alike and were pretty much the only thing that elevated the evening from dining-in depths as plenty of people left clutching their portion like some kind of crazed club.
Oil already staining the brown paper bag, past the parrot and into a night… of chicken wing delight.
Yang Tze Chinese Restaurant is situated at Yang Tze Chinese Village in Klein Windhoek. Call 061 23 4779 for more information.
