(Or: Fool Me Twice, Shame on Fu.)
You set the expectation level high, “Mama Fu’s Asian House,” with your trendy decor, your trance music on the stereo, your McXotic menu choices, and your emo cashier with the forward-brushed haircut with the flip-up fringe (what the fuck is that haircut called, anyway? The “Cocker Spaniel?”) and the thick-framed Buddy Hollies that may or may not serve an opthalmologic purpose.
But why, when I tried you a couple of months back, did you disappoint me so? Your “Thai chicken curry soup” consisted of a couple of planks of chicken meat that appeared to have been rubbed with curry powder (which is, as I know and Mama Fu ought to, not the same as the “curry” in Thai dishes) and dunked in a bowl of vaguely coconutty broth along with oversized slices of what appeared to be completely raw vegetables. “Wow, that wasn’t very good,” I ranted silently as I left, unfulfilled.
But I kept seeing good reviews. A neighborhood staple! Great inexpensive food! Adored by the college kids! Perhaps I just ordered the wrong dish, then.
Fast forward to present time (well, a few hours ago)— a different location, a new day, so I gave Mama another chance to show me her sweet, sweet goodies. But no, if anything, today’s fare was worse. My “Vietnamese Crispy Noodles” were nothing of the kind (crispy, I mean—although hardly Vietnamese either, unless one of their unseen employees had made them so by christening it with a gob of his own Southeast Asian saliva before it arrived at my table), but merely extremely hard to chew. Beef this time, but the same curious slabs of uncooked carrots and such that had graced my “Thai” “curry,” listless in a pool of generic, syrupy brown sauce that I’m confident had simply been poured from a large plastic bottle. No other sort of flavoring, no fresh cilantro or basil, nothing to distinguish it from any shitty strip-mall Chinese takeout.
The one saving grace of that type of food, normally, is that it is dirt-cheap. But even here Mama stumbles: eight bucks for my bowl of chewy-noodle, uncooked-vegetable, industrial-size-bottle-sauce fast food crap. I’d been had again, but never again.
Fuck you, Mama.
P.S. A quick look at their website tells me that Mama Fu’s business footprint is currently limited to a few states in the southern U.S., so I apologize in advance to all who have no fucking clue who “Mama Fu” is.
