An|lehnen - To Lean

Trying out a new takeaway for the first time can be a daunting prospect. You’ve just moved house across the city, have a craving for Chinese food, and found to your horror that your old place won’t deliver so far away, despite your desperate pleas and promises of extra cash. You’ve passed a few places in your new neighbourhood that smell pretty good and look at least reasonably clean, but haven’t had any recommendations. So, being quite logical and pragmatic about the whole thing, you walk to three potentials and grab a copy of their menu and have a ten-second nosy round the inside. You’ll then take this recon info back home where it can be analysed in detail. Was the person at the counter friendly? Frowning? Nonchalant? Watching X Factor? Were there pictures of Mao adorning the walls or rats scuttling across the floor? Was there anyone waiting? Any vaguely oriental-looking customers? If actual Chinese people eat Chinese food from there, it’s a good indication it might at least be authentic. With regard to the menu, price is of course a factor, but shouldn’t be definitive. Other points to consider include its look and feel. If the font is gaudy and the colours are bad, feelings of hunger can quickly turn to nausea. Spelling mistakes are not necessarily a bad thing: it could go someway to proving they are actually foreign and therefore what they cook may not consist solely of an Uncle Ben‘s stir-in sauce. On the other hand, it could just be evidence that they’re thick. Scoring all this criteria, and using a bit of maths (those orientals would be proud!), a winning establishment is selected. However, it’s still not guaranteed to be anything close to decent meal! You can choose to gamble and order some beef or duck dishes, but whenever I’ve done that, the meat has been far from lean - more a fatty, tendon-filled mouthful of guaranteed-gag. So if you’re nowhere near as anal as me, and want to skip all the other needless, speculative and borderline racist analysis, just always go for the chicken! If you can’t find one that gets that right, you’d be better off moving back to your old house, or face a depressingly bleak existence devoid of Chinese takeaway.