Asia Asia Asia

This post is dedicated to everything described with the adjectives Asia, Asian, or Oriental.

First, we will start with a menu item at the restaurant Fatz. Seriously, Fatz - where "everyone's a regular" [because they no longer possess the physical ability to walk out of the restaurant]. The aptly-named dine-in cafe has a bread service consisting of fried poppyseed muffins. Konichiwa, cardiovascular disease! But I digress. When I went there in August with my parents, my dad ordered this culinary delight:

Lu Lu's Chinese Chicken Salad

Grilled Asian chicken, crisp greens, Chinese vegetables, mandarin oranges and crunchy wonton strips all tossed with sesame oriental dressing and garnished with cilantro.

First, who the hell is Lu Lu? I want to know if she's getting a cut of the profits. (I hope that she wasn't an undocumented immigrant who lived most of her life in the U.S. and went to college here -- since we still don't believe that she deserves citizenship.) Anyway, I was horrified that Fatz had imported some poor chicken from Asia after it passed the TOEFL test -- only to grill its avian ass. Fatz then wanted to raise the red lantern, so to speak, by festooning the salad's canopy with Chinese vegetables such as broccoli, carrots, and, er..., red onions. (See?! Red. Authenticism abounds.) And then there are the mandarin oranges and sesame oriental dressing. Marco? Polo.

The moral of the story: wonton strips make anything Asian. This is why I carry them around the sleeves of my shenyi all the time.

The Asia Trail

Ok, fine. So the entire first part of this post was a lowsy front for my posting the following picture from the National Zoo. I went to see the pandas last Saturday with Lindsey and Jill, the Americorps member at Food & Friends. The zoo was a lot of fun, and it was festively decorarted for Halloween. There were interesting tombstones all around, each featuring an epitaph of an extinct species.

The panda habitat (sponsored by Fujifilm in an example of Pan-Asian love) was located on a part of the zoo called the Asia Trail. I mean, opium wars and Open Door Policies aside, I didn't find the name of this exhibit as egregious as Lu Lu's Super-Oriental Chinese Chicken Asian Salad. (I'm still waiting for Fatz to debut Fu Manchu's Pork Karate Chop.) However, the Halloween decorations in this part of the zoo were just a little out of control:

I mean, really? I was pretty hungry, and those sleeves did not have any wonton strips in them. I was sorely, sorely disappointed, to say the least. Thanks a lot, Smithsonian...