We finally found a decent restaurant.

It's been a hard task. Small town restaurants generally fit into two categories: 1) Okay food but lazy service, or 2) Food so bland you might as well eat the menu.

The larger chain restaurants (Boston Pizza, Moxie's, and the like) fit into the first category. They know they are the only real game in town, so the waitresses can spend their time chatting up the cute delivery boy instead of bringing you the Parmesan cheese.

Some small restaurants also fit this bill. The new Italian place a block away from our apartment looked like a good prospect. The food smelled yummy and it was so close to our place that it had the potential to become 'Our Restaurant'.

You know what I mean. The place you always head to when you need a break in the afternoon, or are too lazy to make dinner and don't want to drive all over the place. You know the one.

The food was good, mind you, but the service stank. Not that they were rude! No one in this town is rude, but they all seem to feel it's proper to let you stew in your own juices for a half hour before someone comes over to check if you've got a drink.

In the second and more awful category, we include places like the Fortune Garden, a Chinese buffet that originally looked very promising, with a big selection and large dining room.

Chinese buffets are never high cuisine, that's true, but most of them at least offer some palatable choices. In all 50 selections available to us, any item that wasn't totally bland was actively offensive. It's always a sad thing when you leave a buffet still hungry.

The other day we risked another buffet, this one with the unpromising name of the 'Medicine Hat Buffet'. Sounds wonderful, eh? I had heard of the place on the radio and I had a craving for Won Ton Soup, so we decided to risk it.

Finally.

Flavor.

Not the best Chinese food in the world, but nearly everything there was tasty. Even the non-Chinese selections (All small-town Chinese buffets seem to have 25-50% non-Chinese items like ham, mashed potatoes and onion rings. It's like a law or something) were pretty good. It was good enough that we even went back for lunch today, when my Won Ton craving resurfaced.

I don't think that standard Chinese fare really needs all the fancy names. Your average Chinese food restaurant simply serves items based on the Chinese food formula of:

[Preparation method] [Prime ingredient] in [Sauce]

Preparation methods: steamed, baked, deep-fried, and boiled
Prime ingredients: beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, vegetables, and noodles
Sauces: black, yellow, brown, and red

You can mix together any items from the above list and come up with a Chinese food dish. Deep-fried beef in brown sauce = Ginger beef. Baked pork in red sauce = Sweet and sour pork. Boiled vegetables in yellow sauce = Vegetable Curry.

It's the sauces that are the key. Cheap Chinese food places use the same sauce for a variety of different dishes, and name them all separately. For example, the ubiquitous red sauce is variously known as sweet-and-sour sauce, lobster sauce, etc. As a side note, we figure that red sauce must be like ketchup in China, as an average of one-third of the items in a standard Chinese buffet are either cooked in it or have it on the side.

Which is okay. We like the red sauce.

Mmm. Red sauce.

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