In a thread over on the vtubers board, Kendra said about restaurants in Japan:
>To the point they have display
>food that will show you the size and portions of what's on the menu.

This used to be a thing at a certain stratum of restaurants in the US, too. When I was a kid, there was a Tastee-Freez a couple towns over that had neatly painted plaster models of everything they offered in a big display case that doubled as the counter. Not just the ice cream dishes, but the burgers and stuff too.

I've probably talked about it before at some point, but I'm still very nostalgic about that Tastee-Freez. When I was in middle school, the old couple who ran it sold the place to a Vietnamese family, who converted it into a Chinese restaurant--and kept the Tastee-Freez franchise. It was the only restaurant I've ever seen where you could get a pu pu platter, a burger, and a banana split.

Man, I miss that place. When the matriarch of the family retired and passed it on to her daughter, the daughter's (white) husband had the brilliant idea to let the Tastee-Freez license go and turn the restaurant into a bar. Aaaand then it partly burned down and never reopened. Sic transit gloria mundi.

(The daughter ran a food truck in the next town over for a while thereafter, serving the same Chinese food they used to offer at the Tastee-Freez, but she hasn't opened for a couple years. Sad face. I miss the way she does beef teriyaki and fried rice.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>(The daughter ran a food truck in the next town over for a while
>thereafter, serving the same Chinese food they used to offer at the
>Tastee-Freez, but she hasn't opened for a couple years. Sad face. I
>miss the way she does beef teriyaki and fried rice.)
>
>--G.
I understand that feeling (missing good food by people who cared about it.) My hometown had a restaurant called Goo's and they had a signature steak with a custom marinade created by the owner. It was amazing! But he past away without ever sharing the recipe. The daughter took over, unlike your story, she tried everything to remake the marinade, including scientific analysis of the remaining marinade. Last time I was home, the steak was close but not exact.

Thanks!
Phantom

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

>>(The daughter ran a food truck in the next town over for a while
>>thereafter, serving the same Chinese food they used to offer at the
>>Tastee-Freez, but she hasn't opened for a couple years. Sad face. I
>>miss the way she does beef teriyaki and fried rice.)
>I understand that feeling (missing good food by people who cared about
>it.) My hometown had a restaurant called Goo's and they had a
>signature steak with a custom marinade created by the owner. It was
>amazing!

I've already posted about the Mongolian BBQ place in New Brunswick, but I just have to mention another restaurant, more recently gone, that's the equivalent to these establishments. Tumulty's Pub -- which years before I moved to the area was the last holdout when Johnson and Johnson was buying up the land for their new headquarters complex next to the river. J&J custom-built them a new building just a couple blocks away to convince them to sell, and that's the location I remember fondly, with model trains running in the rafters and great food including a pork roll sandwich with a cheese sauce that they had to take off the menu when the only supplier for the sauce stopped making it. They went out of business (as many places did) around the pandemic, and we have not been tempted yet to try the restaurant that succeeded them.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Dunno if this is better or worse (and certainly not trying to make it a competition!), but we had a local Chinese place that was really good . . . only now it's steadily gone downhill since the pandemic. I really should go in and see if they've turned it around, but I'm expecting to be disappointed.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

We had a Chinese place here, too. It wasn’t doing great even before (still great food tho) but once the pand mic hit, or thereabouts, it closed, got sold, and now it’s an Indian place. I spent my whole life there! Neither of the other places do the stuff I like right, or at all in case of a couple of dishes.

There was a place my gaming group used to go to in Buffalo, NY, called Momo's.

They were a kind of all-you-can-eat place but centered around a "Mongolian BBQ", one of those places with the giant gas-fired griddle where you pick your ingredients out of a buffet and the chefs stir-fry them in front of you on that big griddle.

They had a huge selection of stuff to throw into it, and a good sauce variety. I've never found another place that equaled it since they shut down.

>They were a kind of all-you-can-eat place but centered around a
>"Mongolian BBQ", one of those places with the giant gas-fired griddle
>where you pick your ingredients out of a buffet and the chefs stir-fry
>them in front of you on that big griddle.

That sounds very similar to Fire+Ice in Cambridge, which I miss going to very much... and which is apparently no longer there, though the website says there's one in Boston. (As an aside, that's the farthest-flung chain I've ever seen. Anaheim, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe... and Boston. And nothing in between. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>That sounds very similar to Fire+Ice in
>Cambridge, which I miss going to very much... and which is apparently
>no longer there, though the website says there's one in Boston. (As
>an aside, that's the farthest-flung chain I've ever seen. Anaheim,
>San Francisco, Lake Tahoe... and Boston. And nothing in between. :)

yeah, the one in Boston is near the Park Place Hotel. The one time I went to Anime Boston, a bunch of us went there for food one night. It was pretty crowded and very slow.

--
Jen Dantes - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lady of Sith Tech Support.
"This may not be a good idea, but it's the only one I have."

>>They were a kind of all-you-can-eat place but centered around a
>>"Mongolian BBQ", one of those places with the giant gas-fired griddle
>>where you pick your ingredients out of a buffet and the chefs stir-fry
>>them in front of you on that big griddle.
>
>That sounds very similar to Fire+Ice in
>Cambridge, which I miss going to very much... and which is apparently
>no longer there, though the website says there's one in Boston. (As
>an aside, that's the farthest-flung chain I've ever seen. Anaheim,
>San Francisco, Lake Tahoe... and Boston. And nothing in between. :)
>
>--G.

Yeah, judging from the website, it's a similar theme.
A small version used to be common in the AYCE chinese buffet places around here, but it seems to have faded away over the years.

In the Twin Cities, that would be Khan's Mongolian Barbecue. There was one 5 minutes from our house. Allegedly used to be a Shakey's Pizza building. I can neither confirm nor deny its existence had any impact on purchasing our house.

It's gone now, victim of a highway renovation project. There's another, but it's an hour away and not as good.

There was a Vietnamese family who ran a "food truck" out of a dilapidated camper in a parking lot in one of MN's northern mining towns. It was all quick Chinese fare. They were open until 2AM every morning to catch the local bar exodus. And they were Really Good Too. Not what you'd expect from a rural town of 8K.

Alas, they folded when the owners retired and the kids didn't want to work that hard for a living. Too bad; the owners allegedly retired well off, if not rolling in dough.

There was a place like that near me, a little building (barely more than a shack) off the highway called The Asian Restaurant.

Owners were a Loatian couple and they made the best Thai curry, Vietnamese bun cha, and Chinese spring rolls in the area. Whenever my wife and I went there the owner would come out from the kitchen in his wifebeater and flip flops and chat with us while we ate. He was 80 going on nine hundred and finally retired to take up fishing full time and his kids weren't interested in running a restaurant.

We were very sad.

--sofaspud
--

>They were a kind of all-you-can-eat place but centered around a
>"Mongolian BBQ", one of those places with the giant gas-fired griddle
>where you pick your ingredients out of a buffet and the chefs stir-fry
>them in front of you on that big griddle.

New Brunswick used to have one not far off the Rutgers campus during the 80s, 90s and into the early 00s, called first "J.P. Lee's" and then "The Round Grill". I dearly loved the place, even as it became obvious that they were cutting back to stay in business. I've seen precious few other Mongolian BBQ places in the years since I discovered them, and I truly miss the experience. There is a place a few miles from us which calls itself a Mongolian BBQ, but... it's an actual barbecue place with a Mongolian menu.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I had a slightly curious experience a bit ago that reminded me of this thread, so I thought I might as well make note of it here.

Back in the early 2000s, when I worked for my (sadly now-defunct) local newspaper, one of the random assignments I picked up was to go and talk to the new proprietors of the Chinese restaurant attached to one of the motels in town. They turned out to be a young couple from mainland China by way of New York City. Like a lot of Chinese immigrants to the US, they go by Western names when dealing with the locals, so I've always known them as Ed and Amy.

Ed and Amy came to the US as part of an immigration scheme that finds people work in such restaurants, similar to the widespread phenomenon of pizza places run by Greek immigrants in the Northeast. They had a young son, and they told me they jumped at the chance to come to Maine because they thought it would be a better place for him to grow up than NYC.

Since I stopped by before the restaurant opened on their first day in town, and they insisted on making me some fried rice, I believe I was technically their first customer.

A couple years later, they rotated out of that restaurant to make way for the next newcomers, and they liked it here enough that rather than move on to another assignment elsewhere, they opened their own little place elsewhere in town. I have fond memories of eating there while their son watched SpongeBob on the TV set by the bar.

A while after that, apparently wanting to decrease their overhead, Ed and Amy sold the restaurant and bought a camper trailer that was converted into a food truck, then set it up semi-permanently in an empty lot in the next town over. It may give you an impression of how hardy these folks are when I tell you that they ran the food trailer, dubbed Ed's Kitchen, year-round, apart from a couple of weeks off in the winter to go back to China for the lunar new year.

Years went by, their son grew up and moved away to school, many chicken fingers and beef teriyaki were consumed. I won't claim I got to know them well, but I'd see them in the supermarket now and then. If my mother or I turned up at their store alone, Amy would always ask after the one who wasn't there, and Ed usually leaned out of the kitchen to give us a wave.

Early last month, I stopped off on my way home from a shop day to pick up some chicken fingers, and there on the front of the storefront was a sign.

As it happened, September 25 was also a shop day, and I stopped on my way home. They were just shutting off their OPEN sign when I got out of the car, but Amy recognized me and let me in anyway. They were out of everything except beef teriyaki and chicken fried rice, so that's what I got.

I'm pretty sure I was their first customer, and I was definitely their last--they turned away someone who showed up after me, and were packing up to leave as I left.

So that was kind of strange, and oddly poignant. Amy told me they're staying in the area, so I'll probably keep running into them at the supermarket occasionally. I'm not sure what's going on with Ed's health, and didn't feel like I could really ask, but I hope whatever it is resolves positively.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.