Lobster Noodles/ Chinatown

After my evening class, I decided to pop down to Chinatown for my dinner (well, technically lunch because I didn't have time for lunch...). I decided to pick Crispy Duck for my dinner; I was thinking of having some lobster noodles, mainly because the bloody poster outside showed a huge portion...

So there I was, the maitre 'd (or the best equivalent I can think of in a Chinese restaurant) wanted to seat me diagonally opposite a guy about to tuck into his meal. Urgh, who likes that? And it was around 9pm, past dinner hour! I gestured to the empty table right next to me, he said no. Famished, I just sat down without wanting to make a fuss.

'I'd like the lobster noodles please', I informed the waitress. She disappeared for a minute, and came back and asked me to move to the next table (the one I wanted initially). Whether that had anything to do with the noodles I have no idea...

I called EC and proceeded to bitch a bit about the place, in Malay of course. 'I think its owned by a Malaysian...'. Uh oh. So much for attempting discretion. Anyway soon enough the food came, I bade EC farewell and a speedy recovery. I wondered about how I was going to take a picture with no camera, when I remembered my phone had an inbuilt camera! So here we go, lousy quality:


The lobster noodles. £15. Naturally it invoked curious looks from nearby tables.

My first reaction: Where are the bloody noodles? The dish was 80% lobster and 20% noodles, a far cry from the poster on the outside. Sigh. To give you an idea of how much noodles there was, it was half of the typical £4.50 noodle dish. I downed it all at a leisurely pace and my fingers got a bit sore from trying to pick the lobster apart with my chopsticks... it was probably worth only around £10 if you ask me.

So off I went to Kowloon to try to get some roast pork buns and egg tarts (after paying for the lobster noodles using my poshest credit card to subtly pick a bone at the aforementioned maitre 'd); unfortunately they were sold out of both. And of course as usual I would speak a mishmash of Mandarin and Cantonese...

'You char siew pao mou? (Do you have roast pork buns?)' 'Mou juo (sold out)' 'Oh.. xiexie (thank you; I was supposed to have gone ng goi sei (or however the hell the pinyin is)).'

Then it was off to buy some Korean noodles; Samyang (formerly Nongshim, I believe) makes some fantastic instant noodles. For this I went to Oriental Delight. There was a man inside who wanted to try out some Chinese pastry; the staff was having a tough time trying to explain what lotus paste was, so I tried to be helpful:

'That's made from the paste of the seeds of some water-plant'
'Is it sweet?'
'It depends... I have no idea how sweet is the one they sell here'
*Takes it after some deliberation, and quickly gets into another misunderstanding when the staff picks another item*
'It's buy one free one'
'I don't want another one'
'But its free... you get two for the price of one'
'Ah.. alright'

All this while me and the staff were exchanging sheepish glances at each other. As the man walks to the counter.. '他不明白' (ta bu ming bai; he doesn't understand), I hear the lady exclaim to another member of staff.

As for me, I made some Korean noodles and snacked on peanuts when I got home to fill my stomach.....