Birthday dinner for 10???

Um, no just 2 thanks!

Aaron asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and I said that I wanted to go to a good/nice Chinese restaurant. (It didn't have to be fancy, but mainly just good.) So we decided to go to this Cantonese restaurant that we had read good reviews about online. We studied the map, found where we needed to go and boarded the bus with all the peasants. We guessed at the Chinese characters correctly and managed to get off at the right stop and then walked about 15-20 minutes until we got to the restaurant. As we walked past the restaurant to go inside I saw some people eating through the window, but didn't notice their surroundings much. We walked up to the hostess stand and told her a table for 2 and we followed her to our table. Now this isn't your typical layout for a restaurant. At the main entrance there's a hostess stand, but it opens up into a courtyard. The people we saw eating were in the building to the right. She took us halfway down the courtyard to the building on the left, up one flight of stairs and then we curved a bit around on the upstairs outside walkway. She stopped outside of a door, opened the door then turned on the lights and the A/C and we looked inside to see that we have our own private dining room with a table set for 10.



Hmmmmmm. Not quite what we expected.

Aaron and I looked at each other puzzled. We reflected back on our "conversation" with our hostess and then it came back to us. After we stood there and held up our hands indicating 2 she then spoke to us in Chinese and we responded by nodding our heads and saying "two." Well, I guess somehow that translated into "private room for 10!"

So what's wrong with being treated like royalty by having our own private room??? So we embraced our rise to power and admired our surroundings. It turned out the room was quite nicely equipped with a flat screen tv, a "sitting area" with some very uncomfortable looking chairs, our own private toilet and our very own waitress! She did her job well standing off to the side in the corner of the room waiting, just to make sure that at any given moment we didn't need anything. We think that these rooms are mainly used by people having a party and are there for several hours. They sit around the table, smoke, drink, watch tv. When someone's had too much to drink, he can start to sleep it off on the "sofa" (it's really a hard wooden bench with a very thin cushion.)



We were definitely the main attraction as far as the staff was concerned because various cooks, cleaning ladies and other waitresses kept walking by to peek in the window at us. At one point we had about 6 different staff members in our room, ranging from a woman in a business suit to a cleaning lady - none of them were talking to us, they were just trying to look busy and like they "needed" to be there. It was really amusing.

We enjoyed ourselves, despite being slightly overwhelmed. The food was excellent and we discovered that chilled aloe is quite tasty. We also had a saute with white fish, colored peppers, mango and pear; fried rice and then this not so good filo pastry thing (which we won't get again.)

So as we're walking through the courtyard to leave I look at that building on the right (where I had seen the gentlemen eating on our way in) to see if they are also private dining rooms - oh no - it's a big public dining room, with many tables just for 2!!!!