WHAT ON EARTH is this horrible goo?! Damn you to HELL Golden Wok!

The BBQ Pit
1

All right, so I made the poor decision of ordering from the local Golden Wok. My friends typically call it “Ass Wok”, due to the general horribleness of the food. However, I was desperate for something fast before leaving for work and there was nothing in the house, and I’ve gotten something delivered from pretty much every other place type of cuisine within the last month.

I ordered from them before years ago when they first opened and I vaguely remembered it being bad, but I wanted to give them another chance. Well, mostly I just didn’t want pizza or pitas again.

So, I ordered two simple items: vegetable egg foo young and vegetarian tofu soup. Not hard to make. I’ve gotten the exact same thing from every other place in town and it’s been nearly identical, so I figured it’d be a sure bet.

I call up, and the chick on the other end of the phone is awful. She is obviously not paying any attention to what I’m saying (and she has an American accent, so it’s not like it’s a language issue). I have to repeat the order several times. They give the delivery time as forty minutes, and I think to myself, it’s a bit long, but ok.

The guy is frantically pounding on my door within about fifteen minutes. I’m sorry I wasn’t waiting directly next to the door, dude, but they told me forty minutes. Anyhow, I can’t really complain about the fast service, but the guy didn’t even really talk. He just said “Hi” and stared at me. Last I checked, it was customary to give the total, say thank you, et cetera. Whatever.

So, unsatisfying human interactions over, I open up the first container and – what is this horrible goo?!

There is this translucent whitish goo filling the container to the brim, covering sparse pea pods and carrots. There’s no egg to be seen. I think back and recall that this looks a lot – no, exactly like the mixed vegetable dish I got last time and that I hated it because of this goo. I figure, the chick took the order wrong because she wasn’t paying attention.

I call back, get the same girl. Goody.

I try to calmly let the person know that I seem to have gotten the wrong thing – this looks nothing like egg foo young. She hems and haws, then goes and talks to someone else. She comes back with “dump it out – there should be egg at the bottom.”

What?! I dump it out on a plate and, sure enough, there is scrambled eggs at the bottom. This is nothing like the egg foo young I’ve ever had. It’s scrambled eggs with carrots, a couple pea pods and oodles of sick looking fluid everywhere. It’s mucus like. It looks like an alien vomited on it.

I let the person know that this isn’t really what I was expecting at all. She just said “Well, that’s how we make it”. Didn’t offer anything else after I let her know I didn’t want this and I wasn’t happy.

This is how we make it?! I don’t care if the local hamburger joint calls a fetid pile of maggoty meat covered in bandaids and scabs with no bun and with a cockroach garnish “how they make a hamburger”, that doesn’t make it okay in my book.

Well, having no help from Ass Wok, I give it a chance. It is completely inedible. Keep in mind, I’m not a picky eater – not hardly. I can barely remember a time when I couldn’t eat food delivered to me. The goo has no flavor. I imagine it’s some sort of starch mixed with water. And when I mean no flavor, I mean none – it doesn’t even taste like MSG or salt or anything! It tastes like nothing and it has the texture of slime! The whole mess tastes like nothing but starchy goo!

WHY ON EARTH DID YOU DEFILE PERFECTLY GOOD EGGS AND VEGETABLES WITH THIS UNHOLY CONCOCTION?!

I can’t get past it. I eat a few bites and start to feel queasy and toss it in the garbage. All right, I figure, at least I can eat the soup. I pick it up, it’s very hot. Too hot – it tastes scalded. It’s still got a starchy, tasteless broth, but with a pronounced burnt taste as well. Also, it only has a few tiny chunks of tofu at the bottom and two floating pea pods. What the…

I have a hint for you, Ass Wok - CORN STARCH IS NOT A SPICE! USE AT LEAST SOME SALT, FOR CHRISSAKES!! AND I WANT MY TEN DOLLARS BACK!

Anyhow, long story short I paid $10 for some steamed rice.

2

I imagine they’ll be going out of business soon if their food is that abysmal.

3

No, this goo is the same goo that cursed me in high school! That was seven years ago…

4

Wok-fried semen?

5

You’d be surprised. I’ve seen some really horrible places stay in business for decades.

One thing I never got was people here raving about Subway, puveyors of what must be the finest sandwich in all the free world. Among some posters, it almost seems that Subway is sort of a holy temple, where sandwiches of the gods are made from on high. I have been to exactly one Subway in my life, and I have been there only twice. Both times I had to throw out the sandwich after only two or three bites because it was so horrid. I swear, they ran out of lettuce and used wax paper instead. And I swear they left the meat out on the counter for several days.

You would think that with food that bad, they’d be out of business by now, but you’d be wrong.

(Like the OP, I’m not picky – in fact I can be a true glutton sometimes – and both times I went to that Subparway, I was starving my ass off. I would have eaten glass shards smothered in smeg sauce, but I couldn’t finish those godawful sandwiches.)

6

“Ass Wok” - he he. Reminds me of the crappy Chinese joint I used to occasionally eat at, compelled to because I went to lunch with a bunch of co-workers who insisted on going there. The place was called “A Taste of Sechuan” or something like it.

Well, the food was abysmal, but I put up with it - until one day, I was eating away - and found in the midst of my fried noodles a large, fried cockroach. Yuck! (And no, I hadn’t yet bitten it - at least, that one.]

When informed, the others looked closely at their food - and damned if one of my coworkers didn’t find another cockroach entombed in her food!

Well, that did it - the place was promptly renamed (by us) “A Taste of Cockroach”. Needless to say, that was our last visit.

7

I suppose there are always people who will eat weird, nasty crap and keep these places around. I don’t understand these people. Life is too short to choke down questionable goo.

8

Now, those are words to live by. You hear that, guys?

9

Huh. I’m a pretty picky eater – semivegetarian and kind of snotty about food – and Subway is one of the few fast food places I’ll go to regularly. It’s not great, but it’s generally passable.

Maybe that’s just an exceptionally skanky Subway.

Daniel

10

Someone needs to adopt this for a sig line.

11

Is it possible that this was authenic Chinese food, as opposed to stuff designed to appeal to North American palates?

I’m not a worldly man, and the few times I’ve gone to authentic Chinese restaurants with my Chinese friend I’ve always been served some stuff that made me go “ummmmm no. I’ll skip this course thanks…”.

12

That’s what I figure. Then again, if I had to eat there all the time, I’d easily lose as much weight as Jared did.

13

Egg foo yong? In authentic Chinese cuisine? I seriously doubt it.

I’ve been to plenty of authentic restaurants, and while I have seen decapitated chicken heads and eaten chicken feet aplenty, I have never encountered anything like the OP described.

14

Unless there is some area of China where the people have a genetic abnormality and are born without tastebuds, I’d have to say no on that. I’ve had Chinese food that I thought tasted odd, but it actually had a taste.

My personal theory is that the goo is for lubrication – to make it easier to cram down the gullet, since obviously you’re not stopping to savor the flavor.

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Yes, this poor orphaned sig line needs a good home. Won’t you donate a few meager keystrokes to provide food and shelter for this sig? For only a handful of electrons, you can make a difference.

16

ooh ooh i can give it a home please?

17

That sounds about like the Chinese restaurant my grandmother dragged me to once. Unidentifiable, tasteless pap. Of course, she LIKED her food unidentifiable and tasteless…but after that we ate Mexican when we went out. :smiley:

As for Subway, it’s franchised, so quality can vary mightily. There’s one across from where I work that is actually pretty good; they do such a volume of business that there’s no chance anything in there won’t be fresh. But I’ve been at others that were, shall we say, less than stellar.

18

The one thing a don’t particularly like about living here is the questionable quality of some of the resteraunts and take out/delivery places. The food from the only Chinese place that delivers to my house makes me nauseous about every other time, and the owners of the “Mexican” place up the block from where I work apparently don’t believe that food should be spicy.

I don’t get Subway, either. Somebody needs to sit those people down and explain that an Italian Mixed sub shouldn’t have cucumbers on it.

19

Totally. It’s SO the in thing at parties.

20

That’s very unusual. The oens around here always have pretty fresh ingredients. I mean, if the coldcust and fresh veggies don’t do it for you, you’ve either got very unusual tastes or that Subway has been skimping on their refrigeration.

I’m proud to say that Knoxville is an excellent town for cuisine, especially asian. We have multiple excellent Chinese and Japanese restaurant, catering to a variety of wallet sizes. And they have their own mxes of Americanist food and more homeland-originated dishes.

I hate the term “authentic”. Sure, the food may be prepared with an American flavor in mind, but its hardly fake. And its often very good. There’s a local Japanese place which serves it up in this wierd combination of Japanese and American food, but its wonderful. Fried rice by the cartload, your chocie of meat cooked to order at your table, roasted veggies on your plate and lovely-tasting sauces. Its not what you’d find in Tokyo (well, maybe Tokyo) but it’s darned good.