Modern Commerce

We are not big restaurant goers; it’s a generational thing, I’d guess. But, I do tend to feel—as my parents felt about Chinese restaurants—that having a local Thai restaurant is another one of life’s inalienable rights: as in, ‘life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and a good, local Thai restaurant.’ Canadians may not feel that way so much because they may have had fewer Thais come to Canada after the Vietnam experience than came to the U.S. Or maybe Canadians just don’t feel they have an inalienable right to Thai food, given their more moderate national self-concept.

In any case, here on the southern end of the Sunshine Coast, we had no Thai restaurant until relatively recently. We had been meaning to go there for several months, but just didn’t get around to it. But the other night, after a long day of gardening and wall building, we decided to eat Thai. The restaurant is billed as ‘eat-in/take-out,’ and I thought a Thursday night shouldn’t be too busy, so off we went about 7 p.m. for a little Pad Thai. (Part of my relationship with Thai food is to try everybody’s Pad Thai; I eat other things, too, but that’s the starter for a Thai restaurant. If they can’t make great Pad Thai, they aren’t a Thai restaurant, in my view. I have eaten in Thailand, and it was the best food I’ve ever had while traveling, for day-in, day-out, indoor/street stall food. Which is to say, I really like Thai food, and I’m not much at cooking it myself.)

We pull up to a large parking lot with 3 cars that I thought might belong to the staff. Very slow night? Or a very bad sign about the Pad Thai? We enter though a door that has a big OPEN sign, only to find that the ‘eat-in’ option is actually a hallway with three tiny tables overlooking the parking lot. Each table is decorated with three chairs, and nobody is sitting at any of them. At the counter, a 20-something dude—the only person in sight other than us--looked at us as if we were going to ask him to help us change a tire.

‘Uh, uh….take out?’ he finally offered.
‘No, we'll eat-in,’ I said.
‘Well, the thing is,’ his turn, ‘we’re actually kind of busy tonight.’
‘Really?’ my turn, ‘You actually don’t look very busy.’
‘Well, yeah, but we’re busy with the take out. We have to make a lot of take-out tonight. The thing is, because of the take-out we couldn’t get any food for you until, oh, maybe 8:15’ (an hour from that moment).
‘The sign says OPEN, but you are actually not open, is that right?’
‘No, we’re open, but we’re really busy, so we can’t get food served.’
‘You’re a restaurant that can’t serve food, right?’
‘No, we’re just really busy, but yeah, we can’t serve any food right now.’
‘Is it like this all the time?’ inquired Ed.
‘Not usually, not usually, no, no’ stuttered the counter guy.
‘Look,’ I began a whole new topic for this guy. ‘We’re not going to stay and look at your parking lot for an hour so we can eat Thai food, OK?’
‘Right,’ said the counter guy.

So we drove off for some ordinary fish and chips plus a portabello burger (this is the Sunshine Coast, after all). I doubt that the Pad Thai was worth eating. I even doubt that they were cooking take-out back in the kitchen. But I really don’t want to know what they were actually doing.