Chainsaw Chicken

Saturday night, Sean and I tried a new-to-us Vietnamese restaurant in Hong Kong garden (with very cheap prices) and a Chinese-only menu. 

"We'd like those," we said pointing the order of vietnamese spring rolls on the table next to us, "and a bowl of beef and noodles." We pointed to a picture of beef noodles in the menu. 

"They take a long time," our waitress said.

"Which ones are fast?"

"Zhe ge," She replied, which is the generic and oft used phrase for, 'this one.'

We said we'd take it.

"Hao de," said our super serious fu wu yuan, and quickly snatched up our menus.

"Do you have spicy chicken?" we asked.

"No spicy chicken," she replied, and then irritated that it would take us even longer, proceeded to plunk the menus back on the table. (This woman was serious about getting things done quickly!) Obviously irritated, she began to point out to us, like we were small children, the Chinese characters on the menu, which of course was of little use to us since we don't recognize characters.

"Which one is chicken?" We asked.

She pointed to some more characters. We decided to go with it.

Literally moments later, the beef noodles arrived. Curiously they arrived through the front door. The food apparently was being prepared at a different location.

About this same time, I watched as a raw chicken made an exit from the restaurant to be prepared at the mysterious off-site location.

Thirty minutes later, after we had enjoyed our beef noodles, and rice paper rolls (that were delicious, so we ordered another order), our chicken came back in the front door. (Presuming, of course, that the one I saw go out raw had been ours.

 In China, there are very few utensils required in the kitchen. Basically two, in fact: a meat clever and chopsticks. You can, apparently, prepare just about anything in a Chinese kitchen with these two culinary tools alone.

It is still unsettling to us the way chicken is served... usually hacked up with a meat cleaver into pieces manageable with chopsticks. Sean calls this approach "Chainsaw Chicken," which is an apt name as it truly looks as though the poor fowl has meet with a Stihl chainsaw.

 Though unappetizing to look at, the meat at the funny Vietnamese joint was in fact very juicy and delicious. I carefully prodded around the serving tray, trying to avoid sharp looking bones before I found a surprisingly fleshy piece that I popped in my mouth.

 In a matter of moments a series of thoughts passed through my mind... Why is this roundish and fleshy? and What is the sharp thing poking my lip? “It's the head!” My own head quickly processed, or more precisely, half a head! The sharp thing was of course the beak.

Poor Sean, who was sitting across from me, realized something was amiss, though he couldn’t pinpoint what, as he watching me expel the offending half-a-head-with-the-beak-intact into a napkin and then down nearly all of my beer in a single go.

Sean called for the check. Our speedy waitress got it for us quickly!