Happy Birthday, Darling!!!
Yeah! Its Christmas and its Louis' birthday as well. We spent the evening at Ajay's & Manisa's for dinner. We didn't wake up until well past noon. Thanks to Manisa's thoughtfulness, we had some bread and jam before we headed out to Chinatown to scrunge for food.
We actually like our hotel location since its smack near Leicester Square, the West End and Chinatown. There were a few restaurants that were opened in Chinatown and we picked the one where there were lots of awards and write-ups on its windows.
Louis and I ordered a seafood tofu hotpot and oyster sauced vegetables to go along wiht rice. Up till today, I'm still flabbergasted by how much that meal cost us, even factoring the exchange rate difference. The price for lunch came up to be a whopping [bloody] 42GBP!!! What's more unbelieveable was that our bowl of rice for 2 person cost us 6GBP!!! Even by London standard, that sounded like a rip-off, not to mention how incredibly stupid I felt when it works out to be S$18.
Of course we didn't think to check the price for rice. Which Chinese wouldn't consider rice as a staple in their diet and as such, a commodity? When we checked with the staff on the price, they sheepishly admitted that the few Chinese restaurants that were opened on Christmas all hiked up their prices for rice. It helped a teeny-weeny bit that they commiserated with us that the hiked up price for rice was indeed painful for the pocket, but it was little comfort though. Up til today, I still feel so stupid that I paid a cut-throat amount for plain rice.
Thankfully, dinner was at Manisa's. And Manisa's mom specially made me Corn Bhel (a corn snack sprinkled with bhujia) and show me how to do it too. It felt like I was taking a cooking class specially tailored for one since I was in the kitchen with Manisa's mom as she taught me how to make the corn bhel and also lentil poori. Since, it was a day for cooking, I decided to jot down the recipes for all the dishes that I had at Manisa's for the last 2 nights. Perhaps I could adjust some of the ingredients for the dishes so that my mom might be able to eat since she's a strict vegan.
I only told Manisa in the car, on the way to her place, that it was Louis' birthday. She lamented that I didn't give her advance notice so that she could get a cake to celebrate. Still, Louis and I thought she more than made up for it by improvising with a venietta ice-cream cake as a Birthday cake.
3 comments:
Wow...indeed cut-throat, i think the Tan Family better not consider trvlg to London, otherwise, our meal for rice alone will be HUGE..since tis family is RICE Eater... : P
Hope you guys are having a good holidays in Paris.
cheers,
astee
No kidding .... i think you better be prepared to survive on local cuisine then...it's far too expensive...
Well... it sure taught me a lesson to check out the price of rice overseas in the future.
Rice pverseas is usually more expensive than the S$0.30 - S$0.50 we pay per bowl back home, but it shouldn't be at the cut-throat price we paid, say 95% of the time?
Post a Comment