Ubiquitous Chinese flan

I happen to think that if you’re not British, you probably wont understand what I’m driving at here, but if on the off chance you’re sitting reading this in an office or staffroom somewhere in equatorial Africa, I urge you to persevere anyway, because the story I'm about to tell you is nothing short of captivating. There is a special kind of grey, produced by the most solemn of British winter days, the kind of day on which as a child one's options for Sunday afternoon entertainment are severely limited. This grey pervades every element of the human being. It leaks into your cavities like a cartoon smell. Living in Spain, I occasionally think back to this soupy grimness with an silent chuckle, knowing that I'll never have to experience it again if I so choose. I also happen to think that this heavy, lumpen, indecisive grey helps form a large part of the British character. We can be heavy, grey, indecisive, ugly and cold. So can bad Chinese food. I know, I’ve eaten it. I’m sure you have too, but I want to tell you a story and its about me ok? Me,me,me.

I don’t know what it was about the other diners in the Hang Zhou Chinese restaurant near Seville's cathedral, but they immediately made me think of 70's television commercial extras. There was a man in a retro towel polo shirt. He had a moustache and he was wearing very short white shorts, as if he'd just finished a squash game. He was also very earnest, judging by how frequently he bent his head over his food to nod vigorously at his companion. My view of his face was distorted by falling fish shit and rotting food in the dirty water of a 'tropical' fish tank to my left.

He made think of the sort of man who might live in Welwyn-Garden City. I don't know what that is, but it has always sounded extremely mysterious to me, full of soft men in Alan Partridge sports gear. Oh and he had a Thai or Vietnamese wife which somehow completed the picture. She had a perm and looked like the bass player from Status Quo circa 1978. Slightly sinister, slightly sordid. When I saw him, and I came to learn how bad this restaurant is, I had the fleeting thought that he might be a hired diner, booked to create atmosphere and lure passing punters in. Of course, the level of depravity you would need to possess in order to hire this man to advertise your restaurant, neatly coincides with the level of pure, twisted sickness needed to produce such vile food. It made sense.

Never has the maxim 'you get what you pay for' been better applied than to this 'restaurant'. I visited this place at the end of a long month and as with all long months, the financial situation was ropey. When I saw a 6 Euro, three course Chinese meal advertised as I walked past, I jumped at the chance, surely knowing, deep down how upsetting the experience would be. Anyway, hope pushed me through the door, the hope that it is possible to pay bargain-bin prices for edible food (it is, but not here).

The interior of the place reminded me of a wild west saloon bar. It is split into two levels with lots of wood carving and surfaces in evidence. I didn’t stop to check if these were Chinese carvings. Or American for that matter as my attention was distracted by the massive fish tank right in the middle of the room. It looked like it was full of flood water and various marine debris (including, what was that? An eel?!) was floating around, slapping percussively against the sides. I was already reminded of the fall-out from a particularly violent natural disaster, and the accompanying queasiness didn’t make me feel like scarfing cheap Chinese food. but that was what I was here to do so I pressed on reluctantly. What initially attracted me to the place, aside from the price was the choice of six different three course menus, each costing 6 euros and comprising three courses. Good on choice I thought, small on quantity maybe, but surely not dog food? Somebody more cynical than I might see this set-up in a different way. Nobody going into your restaurant and eating a la carte? Then divide all your dishes up into 6 easy-to-manage, cut-price menus, hand write some signs and lure in the penny-pinching hordes. They got me.

Of course, If you’ve been reading these blogs up till now, you’ll have noticed a few things. Firstly, that they are currently perilously out of date and more retrospective than I would like them to be, but I’ll catch up, I promise. The other thing you might have noticed is that my judgement is occasionally impaired by an, some would say, excessive intake of alcohol over the course of a meal. I think when you have finish reading this, I will have been fully vindicated in this respect.

So after a couple of beers to settle the stomach, I ordered my food. I went for the classic combo of spring rolls, rice with three ‘delights’ and sweet and sour pork. I also ordered chicken with Soya bits just because the name aroused my curiosity. Rice grains that stick to the inside of your teeth and catch in your throat on the way down. Suspiciously gelatinous cubes of pork and frozen peas. I finally understand those people who say that when you eat Chinese food, you are likely to be hungry an hour later because when the rice arrived, it certainly looked a pile, but was mostly air and inedible vegetables. All I could do was smother the lot in soy sauce, except it had obviously been sitting in the sun so most of it was dried into a sticky slick at the bottom of the bottle.

It’s never a good sign when you see the owner and his family sitting away from the rest of the guests tucking into something completely different. They were eating what looked like wanton soup and glass noodles and it looked amazing. I had half a mind to march over and demand to share their food. Why not serve real Chinese food, you know, the food that the real Chinese people who run the restaurant eat every day? I was in a Chinese restaurant but the food I was miserably choking on could only be described as a facsimile 1950’s TV dinner version of Chinese food while I looked on enviously as steaming dumplings and fluffy rice was being doled out on the other side of the room.

At some point, one of the waitresses put down her chopsticks long enough to throw down a couple of spring rolls in front of me. They looked like lengths of dented lead pipe and when I exhumed the innards of these beasts, about 8 kilos of bean sprouts spilled out along with a microscopic cube of what looked like chicken, although it may have been a tooth and the saddest looking prawn in the whole world.

My sweet and sour pork(?) arrived shortly after, with astonishing speed. It was plonked down on the opposite side of the table and as I was sitting, for some unknown reason, at the biggest table in the restaurant, I had to stand up to reach over and get it, knocking a glass full of water onto the floor in the process. Things were not going well. Still, at least they didn’t try and charge me for the glass, or the water even.

The most distressing element of the evening was probably the texture of the meat, which was watery and gritty like ripe melon flesh. It had a layer of batter lying on top which had the look of an old postcard and the sweet and sour sauce was neither sweet nor sour but curiously salty.

To get me through this difficult time of self-abuse, I had resorted to more beer. I wonder if they even have a wine list, or whether it has been used to wrap spring rolls. It’s not really the sort of place where one orders wine, unless you want it served out of a Don Simon carton at your table by a depressed looking man in a white dress. Of course, my squash playing dining companion ordered wine and this is what he got. He also ordered dessert and coffee, which I avoided. His dessert was a pineapple ring from a can on a dirty glass plate and his cappuccino (he must surely have seen that the place wasn’t up to providing such rare and mystical brews?) mysteriously morphed into a glass of lukewarm instant coffee somewhere along the chain. I could see the undisolved granules floating in it from where I sat. He sent it back three times and then eventually gave up.

To show some solidarity to my new friend, I also ordered dessert. As the choice consisted of pineapple or the ubiquitous flan, I went for the flan, partly to make the others jealous and partly because I didn’t fancy pineapple from a rusty tin. So the flan appeared, still in its plastic supermarket pot and I ate it and it was the nicest thing about the meal and then I paid and then I left. Walking out into the Seville Autumn, the Giralda glowing majestically above me to my right, the bright Iberian sunshine lighting up the golden bricks of the cathedral I mused that that alone was worth paying six Euros for and then went off to find something to eat.