Day 246 - Dining Chinese, Moldovan Style

Image of a Chinese meal by avlxyz, via Flickr.com

After a few weeks, one of the translators, Ludmilla, suggested that we go out on a Friday evening to the only Chinese restaurant in town. Eight of us agreed to go out that evening for dinner. We asked Ludmilla to make a reservation. When she did, we hadn't expected to have to answer so many questions. First, she asked if we wanted soup. When we responded that we would make that decision when we arrived, she kept pressing us for an answer, so I said we would like soup. When she asked if we wanted wine, I insisted that we would decide when we arrived. Then she asked what we wanted for our main course. When it was clear that waiting until we saw the menu wasn't an option, I said we wanted beef. When she asked if we wanted dessert, I said we did. Did we want tea? No brainer. Of course we wanted tea.

On the evening, it turned out that only five of us were able to go to the restaurnt. When we arrived, the restaurant was empty. We were the only customers. And it was dark. There were no ceiling lights, just a few sconces on the wall. It was also cold. It was October; the heat hadn't been turned on yet.

We were seated at a table in the center of the restaurant, as far from the lights along the walls as possible. But since we had preordered everything, we didn't need to see menus. The food we had preordered was delivered to us, all eight portions to the five of us. First came the soup. Then the main course, with tea, but no wine. We hadn't preordered wine, so we received no wine. Finally came the dessert. We managed to eat all eight portions of all the courses. Not surprisingly, when the bill arrived, it was for eight portions of each of the courses.

While we didn't experience the same contrast to our western expectations at other restaurants, there were other differences as the concepts such as take-out restaurants were imperfectly translated into Moldovan culture. A take-out restaurant began operating from a home about a year after the embassy opened. In Barbados we would have referred to the restaurant as a kitchen garden restaurant since there were no places for patrons to sit - the only option was to step up to the equivalent of a kitchen window to place orders. The food was acceptable, but we couldn't get over the fact that we weren't charged only for the food: the bill included separate charges for the container the food was put into, the napkins, the plastic table ware, and the plastic cups the beverages were served in. I suppose we could have gotten a bargain if we had brought out own dishes for the meals to be served and our own cups for the beverages. But the total price was still so low, we paid the extra charges, assuming that the restauranteurs would eventually figure out they could include the cost of the serving items in the prices for the food items themselves.