Restauranting

We went to a couple restaurants this weekend with friends. Friday, we went to Amigos Tex-Mex in Shekou. I was there last year for my birthday and enjoyed it--the food is pricey, but it's worth it here in China. This time, however, it wasn't quite worth it. The service from the staff was absolutely awful. They tried giving us the wrong meals a few times and then we had to remind them of parts of the meals (for the couple of the group that ordered a set meal). Not only that, but they charged an extra 8 kuai for a little bowl (and I mean little) of salsa. Keep in mind, this is homemade salsa that probably costs about 8 kuai for a bucket. At the end of dinner, we had an argument with the staff about the 10 percent "service fee" that we had to pay. We explained that we would gladly pay it IF they had provided any sort of service. They waived the fee after about 10 minutes of arguing.

Saturday, we found a nice little restaurant in Overseas Chinese Town that got a little write-up in That's PRD. Grey Wolf is a very pleasant restaurant that serves Northern Chinese food (supposedly Xinjiang, but it was missing a lot of the usual dishes). We ordered some spicy lamb kebabs (yang rou chuan) for 3 kuai each and a variety of other meat and vegetable dishes. They even had Xinjiang Black Beer for 18 kuai. Everything tasted great and it was reasonably priced at about 50 kuai per person (much better service than Amigos, too).

The decoration is certainly worth noting at Grey Wolf. It is designed as a prehistoric cave, complete with cave paintings (some of which are rather amusing, like a stick-figure girl in a skirt walking a dog). There are also many framed portraits and historic Chinese scenes on the walls. On the way in, there is a prominent chalk sign forbidden entrance to Japanese. On the wall near the door, they proudly proclaim that they were the first establishment in Shenzhen to deny service to Japanese. Of course, when you look at the portraits on the walls, Hitler shares the same space as Elvis and Charlie Chaplin. It certainly makes for interesting dinner conversation.