This place has atmosphere like a mofo!

Over the weekend I was making some fried rice and as I am standing in the kitchen listening to the oil in the wok sizzle and cutting up some food I was reminded of something.

Years back I lived in the Washington D.C. area. One day my roommate and I where going to a local 7-11 store to pick up some frosty cool beverages to toast a Friday night with. This particular 7-11 was in one of those strip centers and right next to it was a Chinese food restaurant named “The Myoung Dong Café”, I shit you not. Regardless of how it is spelled, to me, that reads my young dong. So as we are getting out of the car to go into the 7-11 the doors of the restaurant come flying open and two women literally come rolling out of the doors each with a handful of the others hair. It looked like something out of a movie, it was just too perfect. So of course we stopped to watch. After bitchslap-o-paloosa was over my roommate and I decided that we had to check this place out sometime. Come on, who could pass up something like that!

A couple of weeks or so later we went in on a Saturday to have lunch and after we got seated we started making small talk with the hostess. During which we mentioned the fight we saw. To make a long story a bit shorter it turns out that fights on the weekends at this place are fairly common. Talk about great advertising! Food and entertainment at any given moment, hell yeah we told our friends about this place. But anyway, back to the story. So while talking with the hostess she tells us that it is a family owned, run and staffed place which sometimes is catalyst for some of the fights and so on, ex-girlfriends/boyfriends and so on come up to make a scene. She continues and points out her relatives and tells us that only a couple of people, mainly busboys where not family. So her mom and dad run the register, her cousins and an older brother are the cooks (who you could see through these big windows in the kitchen), brothers and sisters and an aunt or uncle or two are the other wait staff and so on.

A short while later our waiter brings us our menus, takes our drink orders and pours us some hot tea. The roommate and I start to shoot the breeze and check out the place. There was a bar in the back, the cooks are chopping up meat and people are coming and going and so on. All of which sort of faded into the back ground as we began to look at our menus. But I do recall the fait sound of the cooks cutting up meat in the back ground, it sounded like the drum line for Guns N Roses’ “Paradise City”. You could hear it, boom, chop, boom chop, boom, chop, boom chop over and over again. Then it happened.

The next thing I hear is this loud primal grunt followed by some barking and more grunting. Remember earlier I told you about the family who worked in the place and how you could see the cooks through the windows? Well what our hostess didn’t tell us about was her cousin who is a cook also has Turrets Syndrome.

He let loose with all sorts of noises, my roommate and I looked at each other with silver dollar eyes, decided that it was time to bounce and hauled ass. I had to have the biggest “oh shit” expression on my face and I’m not sure but I might have actually said “feet don’t fail me now”.

Now I am by no way making fun of anyone with this illness but you either have to let people know that ahead of time or don’t let him cook or something. Look, I am from a small town where the rumor mill runs wild and people believe EVRYTHING. And it just so happens that the first Chinese food restaurant in my home town happened to be back door to back door from one of the oldest vets in town, I’m just saying. Rumors get around.

Later we found out that they moved him into the kitchen because he had an episode where he barked at a couple of women while taking their order.

Every weekend that place was packed with all of our friends.

Don’t get dead