This evening, I went to dinner with JJ near our house in the big mall.  Since it’s right beside the closest subway stop and optimal for meeting each other after work, we seem to end up eating dinner here quite often and because of this, we repeatedly visit the same restaurants.  Tonight, we chose this Hong Kong style restaurant on the 2nd floor of this gigantic mall, otherwise known as Cloud Nine at Zhongshan Park.  The name of the restaurant is Kowloon Ice something, the full name escapes me right now, but its just beside the elevators on the 2nd floor.

Anyway, I actually enjoy eating at this place because it has the ambiance of a classy restaurant with cost of a mediocre restaurant.  In addition, the food is Hong Kong style, (whether or not it’s authentic Hong Kong food is up for debate), but it still feels like it’s something other than your average Chinese meal.  For some reason, we usually order the same items on the menu; JJ gets this cheesy rice and seafood dish (the most expensive item on the menu, thank you very much) and I get the Thai fried noodles (Yes, don’t ask why I get the Thai noodles at the Hong Kong restaurant.  It makes no sense, I know).

So to make a long story short (I’m a bit tired as I write this), we both ordered food and had a good dinner.  The meal was fine, nothing out of the ordinary except the menu had changed a bit since the last time we had been there and they no longer had JJ’s cheese rice dish that she always orders.  By the time we were finished with our food, she had to go to class and there was still some food left so I stayed in the restaurant and she left.  We had ordered this strange mango sherbet kind of dish and I was finishing that up.  For some reason, I was slow to get up and I took my time to finish the food before I left the restaurant.  There was some kind of Chinese concert on the TV, I was relaxing, thinking, just plain taking it easy.  When I was finally finished with the ice cream, I stood up to leave.  I walked towards the exit and just about 3 feet before I left the restaurant, a waitress rushed in across me in a perpendicular direction through the kitchen door, which was just beside the restaurant exit.  Right at that moment, the kitchen door made a loud sound and to my surprise, two small rats came whizzing out of the kitchen, 3 inches in front of my feet, past my table and all the way across the restaurant before disappearing from my view.  Immediately there was a shock wave throughout the small restaurant, a continuum of screaming that assuredly lost permanent customers for this restaurant.

I only stuck around for another minute or so while there were people complaining and yelling and on the brink of complaining to some kind of higher authority (which I’ve discussed in past blog posts).  Two things struck me after I witnessed such an event.  First, the waitress who entered the kitchen, who inadvertantly caused this mess, had an unforegetable expression on her face when she first saw the rats go past her feet toward my feet.  She looked at me, not in shock or horror like I did when I first saw the rats, but rather with a hope that possibly I did not see the rats.  The only conclusion to draw from that is that she is so familiar with rats being in the kitchen that she is not even frightened by the sight of one.  The second thing that I thought was pretty amusing was how I went from really enjoying this restaurant to hating it in a matter of 5 seconds and vowing never to go to it again.  If I were to have eaten the ice cream 5 seconds faster, I would have left the place, never to know about the rat incident and would still be going to this place like I was before.  Instead, I had this horrible (or blessed) fortune of seeing these two rats, which I still even now, after 4 hours, can’t get off my mind.