#8 Singapore: Prawn Me. No Really, Prawn Me.

I’m not one of those dorky guys who worships Quentin Tarantino, and I’ve never been a huge fan of the movie True Romance. But for some strange reason, there’s a scene in that movie that has always stuck in my head. Gary Oldman plays a mean ugly pimp who beats the living crap out of poor Christian Slater. Afterward, the mean old pimp says, “Hm. He must have thought it was white boy day. It ain’t white boy day, is it?”

Not that my life resembles True Romance at all (my lovely girlfriend doesn’t look like Patricia Arquette, and she’s not a recovering hooker), but when we went to a little place in Chinatown called Singapore Café, it clearly wasn’t white boy day.

And depending on your taste in food, that’s either a very good thing or a very bad thing.

I usually avoid NYC’s touristy Chinatown, but I was really hankering for some good Singaporean hawker food, and Singapore Café on Mott Street was the only place I could find. I brought three friends, all of whom are at least as white as I am. Two of us left very happy with our meals, and two were pretty much livid. It was kind of an awkward night.

from a real menu in Singapore... "Lamb of Rack" is not served at Singapore Cafe, unfortunately

For those of you who don’t know much about Singapore, here’s the quick rundown. Singapore has only been an independent nation since 1965, when it separated from Malaysia after both managed to get rid of their British colonists. Much of the island feels like an Asian cultural crossroads; though more than 70% of the population traces its ancestry to somewhere in present-day China or Taiwan, you’ll also see plenty of Indians and Malays, as well as a generous sprinkling of Europeans, Arabs, and people of mixed ethnicity. In terms of the food, this means that the phrase “Singaporean cuisine” is a little bit nebulous, since the food varies dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Appropriately, Singapore Café seems to have some mild identity issues. If you pay no attention to the name on the front door, you could easily mistake Singapore Café for a prototypical Chinese restaurant in Chinatown—it’s a small, clean place, adorned with the type of decorations that can easily be purchased in bulk on the streets of Chinatown. The menu is absolutely huge (rarely a good sign, in my opinion), with lots of Chinese greasy spoon standards such General Tso’s chicken and moo goo gai pan. I’m pretty sure that plenty of tourists stumble in, assuming that they’re in a standard Chinese restaurant, and the restaurant is perfectly happy to let them make that assumption.

Case in point: when the server took our drink order, I (somewhat stupidly) asked what types of beers they had. The response was interesting: “Chinese beer, Tsingtao,” he said, with an air of finality, as if they only served Chinese beer. Without really thinking, I ordered one. Then I realized that I was in a Singaporean place, and that there were Tiger beer signs everywhere. I happen to love Tiger, so I switched my order… but wondered why the hell the server didn’t even mention that they sold Tiger or anything else. Were they just accustomed to serving Mott Street tourists who were unlikely to recognize any Asian beers besides Tsingtao?

Unfortunately, two of my companions decided to order nice, safe, Chinese meals at Singapore Café, and that, um, kinda wasn’t the smartest thing they’d ever done. One ordered pepper beef ($11), and he received one of those typical, goopy, greasy plates of food that you can get in pretty much any mall food court or cheap Chinese takeout place. He didn’t complain, but I don’t think that anybody was too impressed with his meal. It wasn’t white boy day, at least not for that particular white boy.

His girlfriend fared even worse. She asked the server (I had a feeling that he was a co-owner, but I thought it would be awkward to ask, especially considering where the night ultimately headed) for a recommendation, and she said that she didn’t like spicy food. The server recommended a “let’s not scare the poor white tourist girl” plate of fried chicken and white rice, otherwise known as Golden Crispy Grilled Chicken BBQ Style ($10). She hated it (“boring” and “too salty”), sent it back, and was pretty cranky about the whole thing… and I can’t really blame her. It clearly wasn’t white girl day, either.

looks angry, doesn't it?

I fared much better. When I ordered prawn mee, the owner/server nodded approvingly and said, “oh, very authentic.” I spent a very strange week in Singapore once on a bizarre business trip, and developed a taste for prawn mee. (After a few days, I also got used to the fact that our bizarrely rural, isolated hotel only served rice noodles for breakfast.) Prawn mee is a type of noodle soup with prawns (duh) and (usually) pork and (if you’re lucky) a few vegetables or other meat bits, all stewed in an angry, fishy red broth. For a mere $6.50, Singapore Café served a gorgeous bowl of the stuff. Unlike my friends, I had no complaints at all, and will undoubtedly head back there for another bowl next time I’m in the neighborhood.

Friend #3 was also pretty happy. She made a point of ordering something that sounded strange and potentially Singaporean—a seafood and bean curd casserole ($13), which resembled like a thick, version of egg drop soup , but was much more loaded with egg and tasty fishy stuff and an occasional bit of vegetable.

mmmmmm, goop!

(Hm, I made that sound kinda gross. No really, it was great. A little bit goopy for my taste, but still pretty tasty.)

Despite my friends’ lame Chinese meals, I’m not going to crap on Singapore Café, mostly because the prawn mee I ate was phenomenal, and I have absolutely no reason to complain. For the others, I guess that this is a cautionary tale of sorts… I think most of us would be leery about ordering American food in a Chinese restaurant, and very few of us would order Chinese food in an American diner. Ordering Chinese food in a Singaporean place? Clearly, that shouldn’t lead to any dinnertime tragedies, but if a restaurant chooses to stick a particular nationality on its awning, I’ll probably stick to whatever national cuisine seems to be the specialty. If you look on yelp, there’s a pretty big range of reviews for this place, and now I understand why—your happiness depends entirely on what you order.

Prices here are really, really cheap, and I’ll certainly come back for a $6.50 bowl of angry red prawn mee bliss. It seems like you’ll be very happy here if you order the right thing, but bitterly disappointed if you make a crappy choice. But either way, at least you won’t waste too much money.

Singapore Cafe
69 Mott Street, Manhattan
Subway: your choice of several Chinatown stations

#7 Barbados: I like Cock’s

If you poke around this website, you’ll notice that my ultimate goal is to eat food from “every nation in the world” without leaving NYC, and you’ll notice that I have my eye on only about 160 nations, give or take. But if we’re being really technical, there are actually about 196 countries on earth, depending on whose list you look at.

Why the discrepancy? Well, it’s obviously pretty ridiculous to hope that, say, Nauru, with a population of 10,000, would have sent chefs or restaurateurs to New York. Vatican City is technically it’s own nation as well, even though only 800 people live there. (I suppose that the body and blood of Christ is the national dish of Vatican City. That’s not a vegetarian entree, huh?)

Anyway, I had to draw the line somewhere, so I decided that countries only qualify for my quest if they have a population of at least 1,000,000 people.

But I’m willing to make an occasional exception. Little Barbados, with its population of 255,000, has sent many thousands of immigrants to NYC. Believe it or not, there are at least three restaurants serving Barbadian (locals prefer the term “Bajan”) food in NYC, and I find that amazing.

Bajan leadpipe lurks in that pastry case

We decided to pick on Cock’s Restaurant in Crown Heights, partly because it’s closer to a subway station than its siblings, and partially because… well… how can you resist a place called Cock’s?

As you might expect, there’s plenty of overlap between Bajan cuisine and, say, Jamaican or Trinidadian food. Cock’s menu includes roti, Caribbean curries, jerk chicken, and stew chicken, much like you might find in other Caribbean haunts. Since a few of us had gorged ourselves silly on Jamaican food earlier in the week, we made a point of ordering a few of the same dishes, just to see if we’d encounter any differences.

This time, I dined in a group of five people, including myself. My law student girlfriend, who usually doesn’t get out much, joined us, along with a Grenadian classmate of hers, who had lots of interesting insights into Caribbean cuisine. We were also accompanied by the usual beefy Puerto Rican and a random white guy from Nebraska. I like all of these people because they’re willing to eat pretty much anything, including cow hooves and blood sausage–which happen to form a combo delicacy called “puddin & souse” in Bajan cuisine.

oh boy... cow hooves!

Cock’s is an extremely informal little place that does most of its business as takeout. There are only three tables, and we monopolized two of them for pretty much the entire evening. Elaine, the friendly Bajan owner of Cock’s, very generously spent a large part of the night talking to us about her food and her country, and we ended up staying in the restaurant from 7:00 until Elaine locked the doors at 11:00.

We obviously took our sweet old time, and the meal accidentally turned into a three-course affair. We started with codfish balls, which are peppery little friend balls of dough with saltcod. A little bit intense from a grease perspective, but really tasty. I didn’t think to ask Elaine about the spices involved, but it seemed to have a similar magic to the Jamaican stew peas—perhaps there’s such a thing as “Bajan pepper”? We washed the codfish balls down with ginger beer and the aforementioned puddin and souse; it’s safe to say that the puddin and souse is an acquired taste if you aren’t a habitual hoof-eater.

For our main courses, we ordered three familiar items: chicken roti, stew chicken, and curry goat. Yes, we ate goat curry twice in the same week.

cou-cou with flying fish... heavenly

I have almost nothing to say about the roti. It was reasonably well-executed, but not the best I’d ever eaten. The stew chicken, on the other hand, was absolutely fantastic. Cock’s version of Bajan stew chicken was much drier than The Island’s, but it somehow had a great balance to it—it was one of those simple plates of chicken that seemed to have some magic to it, and I’m far too ignorant to figure out exactly what made Elaine’s stew chicken so special.

The goat curry was also a winner. Earlier in the week, we sampled a gamey Jamaican goat curry, and I was pretty convinced that goat always inevitably tastes like barnyard, no matter what. Apparently, I was wrong. Cock’s goat (not to be confused with goat’s cock) somehow was much milder, and tasted something like a curried beef potroast, if that makes any sense at all. Whenever I see goat on a menu from now on, I’ll at least entertain the possibility of giving it a try.

But the real highlight of the night was the cou-cou with pan-fried flying fish, the national dish of Barbados. It’s a little bit tough for me to make cou-cou sound good, but if you imagine mashed potatoes made from yellow cornmeal, you won’t be too far off. I absolutely loved the stuff, and maybe that has something to do with the fact that I’m from Iowa, which is a corn-dominated state that often gets mistaken for Idaho, the potato state. I could very easily eat this meal every day for a very long time and never, ever get tired of it. I think that all of my friends completely agreed with me on that one. It’s worth the trip to Crown Heights, just for the cou-cou.

Now, let’s suppose that you have some sort of paranoia disorder, and you feel that you might need some protection as you walk from the restaurant to the Nostrand Avenue subway station. Cock’s has you covered: just order a bag of leadpipe pastry for dessert. For $3, you can get a bag of four little tubes of the rock-hard, almond-flavored pastry, each of which weighs about two pounds.

If you buy a bag of the stuff, you have a couple of choices. You could beat the crap out of somebody with it if that’s your thing. Or, if you’re a kind, gentle soul like Elaine, you’ll dip the leadpipe in coffee, tea, or ginger beer, and gently nibble on it.

But if you eat too much, it might beat the crap out of your poor stomach. Just a friendly warning.

Cock’s Restaurant (no website)
806 Nostrand Ave., Brooklyn
Subway: Nostrand Ave. station (3 train)

#6 Jamaica: Fear the Goat

When my girlfriend casually said something about Jamaican food to a Jamaican friend of hers, the Jamaican friend insisted that we go to The Islands on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn. After taking her advice, I can conclusively say that the Jamaican friend is awesome, and I owe her a cookie.

The Islands is a very small, quirky place with a treacherous staircase leading to a seating area that makes me feel like I’ve accidentally stepped into a little girl’s dollhouse. It’s one of the few places in this world where I actually feel tall. (And just for making me feel tall, this restaurant deserves your money.)

anybody else feel tall, or is it just me?

When we arrived at 1:00 on a Tuesday afternoon, the dinky seating area was closed, but the Jamaican gentleman at the counter let us crowd around the downstairs bar for lunch. “Bar” is a bit of a misnomer—there happen to be three bar stools hanging out there, but no alcohol is served, and the three stools stare straight into The Islands’ tiny kitchen. At that hour of the afternoon, The Islands is pretty much a takeout joint, and we were lucky that the man in charge was kind enough to host us in that tiny strip of space. Thank you, nice Jamaican man in charge!

I showed up with a posse of four people, and none of us have any connection whatsoever to Jamaica. None of us have ever even been near Jamaica, unless you count Puerto Rico or Trinidad and Tobago.

So we had no idea what we were doing.

I declared myself food dictator, and ordered four dishes pretty much at random. Jerk chicken is obviously a classic, and we also ordered stew chicken (jerk’s mellower, gravier brother), goat curry, and stew peas.

As soon as I ordered the stew peas, I wondered what the heck I was thinking. It’s a bunch of beans and peas with bits of corn and carrots and some boiled dough. How could that possibly be exciting? Actually, I really wanted to order the okra and codfish, but they were out. Crappy. So we were stuck with stew peas as our token vegetarian entree.

stinky barnyard animal, lightly seasoned with curry sauce

I’ll start with the meat dishes. All of the plates were absolutely huge, and served with a mound of rice and beans, as well as some stewed vegetables (mostly carrots and cabbage) and a salad garnish. The jerk chicken was fantastic—perhaps not the best I’ve ever tried, but still great. The stew chicken was a huge, huge hit—definitely the best I’ve ever had. And I’ll be honest: this was my first goat experience ever. (Well, I’ve petted goats before, like at petting zoos or something. But I’ve never eaten any pieces of one, at least not that I was aware of.)

I’m not quite sure what to say about the goat. The curry sauce was gentle, and did not overpower the flavor of the meat. But if you’re not used to goat, that’s not necessarily a good thing. As you might guess, goat is pretty gamey stuff—the meat never lets you forget that you’re eating a stinky beast. I’m not knocking The Islands, but I’m not accustomed to the flavor of this particular stinky beast. One of my buddies used to live in Malawi, where goat is a regular part of the menu; he was pretty thrilled with The Island’s version of goat, and I’ll accept that as a full endorsement. (He did, however, report that his bowels were pretty much livid the next day. Not sure whether the goat or the cabbage or the beans were to blame, but I’m pretty sure it was the goat. Sorry, that was probably far more information than you needed.)

much tastier than it looks... I swear

Now on to the stew peas, which I thought would suck. Mmm, kidney beans and peas. Who cares? How could those be good? The crazy thing is that the stew peas were ridiculously amazing, probably even better than the stew chicken or the curry goat. Who knew that a creamy-looking puddle of kidney beans could taste so good?

When I asked the server/cook what spices were in the stew peas, he said, very slowly: “Beans. Peas. Carrots. Flour. Pepper. Regular pepper. Jamaican pepper.”

I have no idea what he meant by “Jamaican pepper,” but I could definitely get used to it… even if my friend’s butt apparently can’t.

The Islands
803 Washington Ave, Brooklyn, New York
Subway: Eastern Parkway – Brooklyn Museum station (2, 3 train)

#5 Bosnia: shrug

I’m just getting warmed up here, but my food experiences have been pretty darned interesting so far. The Ecuadorian and Liberian places pretty much rocked my little white world; the Liberian food definitely rocked my little white stomach. I’ve obviously eaten tons of Greek food in my life, but our whole night at Opa Opa! was one heck of a fun experience.

Bosnian food? Eh, not so thrilling.

Along with two of my buddies, I went to a place called Pasha Bistro in Astoria, across the street from the legendary Opa Opa! Since I’m embarrassingly ignorant about the cuisine of the Balkans, I figured that Pasha, one of a small handful of Bosnian restaurants in NYC, would offer a surprise or two. I was mostly wrong.

much better than a pita-encased buffalo chip

The biggest source of disappointment was that only a select few dishes on the menu seemed to be uniquely Balkan: Pleskavica (Pasha’s signature Bosnian “burger”), cevapi (Bosnian sausage, made from ground beef and lamb), and a Balkan breakfast sandwich. The rest of the menu consisted of a reasonably pedestrian selection of sandwiches and grilled meats and crepes. Our food was all really good, but not anything all that remarkable. (And yeah, I guess I’m getting spoiled: I expected exoticness, for some silly reason.)

And before I continue, let me just be clear about something: if you’re reading this as a general restaurant review, I have exactly zero complaints about Pasha. The restaurant is an incredibly comfortable little place, with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. There was only one server working there, but she was friendly and knowledgeable and efficient. All of the food was great, from a price and quality viewpoint. So if I sound less than enthusiastic, please don’t take it to mean that I disliked the restaurant itself.

also much better than a pita-encased buffalo chip

Let’s start with the pleskavica (usually referred to in English as a “Bosnian burger”). There are a bunch of glowing reviews of this particular burger on yelp, and the reviews are completely appropriate. Start with two monstrous, round pieces of grilled whole wheat flatbread, both of which are as big as a standard dinner plate. Add some hummus, some lettuce and tomato and chopped onion, and a huge, flat piece of grilled lamb sausage, also as large as a standard dinner plate. On the side, there’s a nice little bowl of sour cream and ayvar (often spelled ajvar or aijvar), which is a sweetish red pepper condiment.

The pleskavica is the sort of thing that will get you pretty excited if you’re outrageously hungry, and I would definitely stop by for one of them if I’m Astoria and don’t particularly feel like eating Greek food. But it’s not worth a special trip, in my humble opinion.

(On a side note, the pleskavica definitely did not deserve the abuse heaped on it by another NYC food blogger, who referred to it as the “carnivorous equivalent of particle board” and “a pita-encased buffalo chip.” Hilarious, but wrong.)

The other two entrees were similarly tasty, but also unspectacular.

also does not look or taste like buffalo turd

I ordered a Mediterranean breakfast sandwich, which consisted of egg, lettuce, onion, tomato, hummus, and a sprinkling of cheese, all served on Pasha’s thick, meaty pita. We talked Ryan into eating a mixed kabob platter, which featured huge chunks of grilled chicken, lamb, cevapi (Balkan lamb sausage), and sudzuk (beef sausage). Everything was great. None of it deserves a long, drawn-out story.

Bottom line: if you’re in the area and you don’t feel like indulging in the mayhem of, say, Opa Opa!, Pasha is a great spot for a casual meal. Pasha is perfectly safe for anybody who has a phobia of ethnic food, or for anybody who just wants a solid meal. It just isn’t too thrilling for somebody who has recently been spoiled by Greek and Liberian hospitality.

Pasha Cafe & Grill
28-44 31st Street, Astoria
Subway: 30th Ave. station (N, W trains)

#4 Greece: Moose Caca! Ewwwwwww…

This is going to be a really, really long story. You’ve been warned.

I have to say that I’m always a little bit embarrassed to walk into a real Greek restaurant in a place like Astoria, Queens. I’m half-Greek, the grandson of Greek immigrants who owned (surprise!) a Greek diner in Boston. My father was born in the U.S., but he’s a classic, chest-pounding Greek who wears his heritage on his sleeve and thinks that all non-Greeks are culturally inferior. My father is a very good Greek.

I, on the other hand, am an incredibly shitty Greek. I don’t speak a word of Greek, I never go to church, I have no plans to marry a nice Greek girl, and I pretty much have no connection to any Greekness whatsoever. I feel very guilty about this.

As it turns out, my lily-white girlfriend (who is as “non-ethnic” as an American can possibly get) has an uncle (let’s call him Uncle Bill) in NYC who is large and German, and he’s actually a better Greek than I am. He grew up in Astoria, and insisted that we go to a restaurant called Opa Opa! in his old ‘hood.

As soon as we walked in, we were greeted by the owner, who knows Uncle Bill quite well. She looked at me, and almost immediately started berating me before I had a chance to say anything. I heard the phrase “shame on you!” several times before we even sat down.

Ah, Greek hospitality. There’s nothing like it.

nothing says fun like a dancing Greek

Thing is, I totally deserved the abuse. Uncle Bill gave the owner a big hug as soon as he walked in the door, and then introduced all of us to her. Naturally, Uncle Bill mentioned that I was Greek, but that I didn’t speak any Greek at all. As soon as he said that, the owner/hostess, a lovely, fiery septuagenarian with a classic Greek accent, started yelling at me. “Shame on you! What kind of Greek are you! Why don’t you learn some Greek like a good Greek boy!” I mumbled some excuses, and probably said something about how my father is a numbnut. She glared at me, laughed, gave me a hug, and brought us to our table in the back of the restaurant.

(For what it’s worth, I do speak just a little wee bit of Greek: I was an altar boy for a couple of years when I was a kid, and I could probably still recite some chunks of the church service in Greek. Too bad I would have no idea what it meant, other than something about God or Jesus or something. I can also say “you have shit for brains” in Greek, but I didn’t think that would be a useful phrase at that particular moment.)

At least the owner didn’t pinch my cheeks, like the old ladies used to at church when I was a kid. If there’s a reason why I’m no longer religious, it might have something to do with all of the cheek-pinching that went on in my formative years in church. (No, I’m not talking about those cheeks, and the priest would never dream of doing anything like that. Get your mind out of the gutter.)

fried stuff is always fun

I’m not going to spend too much time ranting and raving about how great the food was at Opa Opa. But yeah, the food was great—better than Mom used to make. (Mom is Russian- and Ukrainian-American, but she learned to make fantastic Greek food.) We had spanikopita (spinach pie made with feta cheese and phyllo dough), Greek-style fried eggplant and zucchini (the first time I’ve eaten that particular dish since leaving home), souvlaki (i.e. Greek kabobs), and moussaka, the national dish of Greece.

I grew up on moussaka. Every holiday—Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, whatever—we’d make spanikopita and moussaka. My sister and mother both pride themselves on their versions of moussaka. Opa Opa’s moussaka kicked both of their asses. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, dear sister who speaks even less Greek than I do.

By the way, dear sister, I bring you a special message from Astoria: shame on you for not speaking Greek! What kind of Greek are you? At least I know how to say “you have sh** for brains” in Greek. (Back when I worked as a bartender, one of my bar regulars taught me that phrase, which tells you what this particular bar regular thought of my intellect.) But at least I speak a little bit more Greek than you do, and that’s gotta count for something.

Ewww, moose caca! (And lemon potatoes and dolma…)

Anyway, moussaka is something akin to a Greek lasagna, with layers of eggplant, ground beef, and a puffy cream that should ideally have a consistency somewhere between a quiche and a meringue pie. It’s one of my favorite foods ever when it’s good, but I imagine that it’s an acquired taste for non-Greeks.

Whenever I eat moussaka, I think of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which is one of my favorite movies ever. The father of the Greek bride is not unlike my own father, who also swore that every word in every language originally came from Greek. When I came back from a semester in Chile when I was in college, my father would make me say things in Spanish, and then tell me in painstaking detail how every word I’d just said had its roots in Greek. I am not making this up.

When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, he would also say things like, “Heh, these stupid WASPs around here. Our ancestors were inventing democracy and writing great works of philosophy when their people were still swinging from the trees.” I basically pissed myself when the same line appeared in the film, pretty much exactly as my father used to say it.

Anyway, back to the moussaka. There’s a great moment in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, when the main character sits down in the school cafeteria with a bunch of ditsy “normal white American” bimbos. They’re all eating sandwiches on Wonder bread. They ask the geeky, big-boned, big-nosed Greek girl what she’s eating for lunch. She says, “moussaka.” The bimbos yell “Moose caca!!!!!! Ewwwwwww!!!!!” And then they laugh their asses off while the poor awkward Greek girl feels awkward and ashamed. That always cracks me up, mostly because I know that moussaka is friggin’ awesome.

And Opa Opa’s moussaka was the best ever.

Enough about the food. The night went downhill very, very quickly—and I mean that in the best possible way. I was with my girlfriend Amber and her mother Kim, who was celebrating her birthday. Uncle Bill was born and raised in Astoria, and let me say again that he is a better Greek than I am, even though his ancestors are mostly German. The little birthday celebration was his idea. As soon as we sat down, he ordered a liter of white wine and a half-liter of red wine. Kim wasn’t drinking wine, so she ordered a beer, which rapidly turned into several beers.

Once Uncle Bill had consumed his share of the first liter and a half of wine, he ordered another half-liter. Three people, two liters of wine. Basically, each of us drank the equivalent of a full 750 mg bottle of wine. Keep that in mind.

nothing says fun like a grainy photo of a smiling lady with a pink balloon

So for some reason, Uncle Bill started getting nostalgic, and decided to serenade Kim with smaltzy old love songs from the 1940s and 1950s. It was very straightforward stuff, with lyrics like “Oh, you’ll never know how much I love yooooouuuuuuu…” We were sitting right in the middle of a small, tightly-packed room, and we attracted more than our share of attention. Bill just kept singing, with his arm around Kim, who was probably having more fun than she’d had in years. (And she’s a very fun lady—seriously, I’m not just saying that because I happen to be dating her daughter. Kim is fun.)

As our neighbors looked at us with that “man, you guys are fun and really, really funny” look on their faces, Uncle Bill started telling them that they’d just gotten engaged. Next thing you know, all of the customers and staff of Opa Opa were throwing a big “engagement party” for Kim and Bill. Many of the patrons were Greeks (i.e. real Greeks who can say more than “you have sh** for brains” in Greek), so there was lots of shouting and drinking and heartfelt “OPA!” sounds. Nobody broke any plates, though, which suggests that they might have understood that the crazy old couple was completely full of crap about getting engaged.

So, yeah. Kim left with a pink balloon tied to a drinking straw, we drank an absolutely unreasonable amount of wine and Greek beer, ate some outrageous souvlaki and moose caca, saw some of the most hilariously ugly decorations ever found in a serious restaurant, and got lots of congratulatory hugs from the owner and staff on our way out.

If you’re reading the news much lately, you have every reason to believe that Greeks might be pretty darned terrible at running an economy. But damn, they (we?) sure are good at running restaurants and throwing parties.