customers beware!

CUSTOMER BEWARE!

​As I visit restaurants I'm amazed at what restaurants do to their customers. Often times suppliers offer deals of bulk purchase of certain items. Not that they are nice guys. With anything to bring prices down they buy bulk items and store it in the warehouse. Sometimes they can get rid of them within a reasonable time period due to high demand. Then there are items that just sit around.
This is the case of a Malaysian restaurant in Philadelphia, PA called Penang. Right in the heart of Philly Chinatown. One of the things about Chinese restaurant people. They make their money and then sell to another party. This was that case. The original owners provided the best Malaysian food and my wife enjoyed the traditional food immensely. other than the price, the food reminded her of home.  We used to visit Philly Chinatown pretty frequently. We usually spent the whole day there eating, shopping and browsing around.  Sometimes, we would have an appetizer at one restaurant, a meal at another restaurant and a dessert at another place. During one trip, we had a Vietnamese appetizer, a Cantonese seafood dish and a Asian dessert in 1 day.
Then our lives got busy with our daughter and we couldn't afford to spend a whole day in Chinatown. Maybe we went back to Chinatown one or two times with our daughter.  We went back to the Malaysian restaurant same name but it seemed like different management. My wife ordered her favorite noodle dish, and the noodles are long and chewy with beef, bean sprouts and some veggies with a nice oyster sauce. What we got was small broken noodles that were mushy. My wife knew that this was wrong and complained. Management insisted that this is how the dish is made. Now, they lied to our face. and we were so upset and the fact that to them the customer is wrong.
I knew exactly what happened. the new owners got a great bargain price to buy noodles that have been laying around for quite sometime and made the noodles old and brittle and being Chef Woo Can I know what happens to old noodles.
Here's a little secret, Asian people loves to eat long noodles because in so many ways noodles represent longevity. At Asian banquets celebrating various traditions like wedding, one of the main dishes is a long noodle dish representing a long and happy marriage or may you live a long life.
So, on your next visit to your favorite Asian restaurant   and your served as a main course a noodle dish that short and mushy, please complain and let me know.
Now, I don't mean the crunchy noodles that's served once your seated and dip the noodles in duck sauce or hot mustard.  The lo mein noodles, the Singapore noodles, the chow fun noodles or the Pho Vietnamese noodles.    
By Chef woo Can at www.chefwoocanmaryland.com
#customerbeware