Choices & Chopsticks

Post written by Bridget Strub.

Asian restaurants have always been an interesting phenomenon to me. Neither my husband Pete nor I are that crazy about Asian cuisine. I enjoy it, and occasionally crave it, but that’s usually the extent of it. We’ve tried to expand our experiences to different restaurants around town, and in doing so we’ve seen a wide variety of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Most of our experiences, however, have occurred between the bad and the ugly range.

We’ve been left to wait for hours to get a Coke refill and our check while watching our waitress watch us through a glass wall while hanging out with the other wait staff. We’ve caught glimpses into kitchens behind tattered curtain that exposed conditions much like those found on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. We’ve paid more for the décor on the wall than for the quality or portions of the food. I’ve spent more time in the bathroom after a visit to one restaurant than I did eating the meal. And the list could go on.

So as I ventured to go beyond my comfort zone this week, I was a little timid to try Wok With You, an Asian restaurant at Park Point in Henrietta. I really wanted our first restaurant in this quest for new and exciting places to be a good one. I actually really freaked out about it for a second. I grasped the enormity of my decision. Pete and I only get to eat out once a week. Our dinner usually determines the temperature for the rest of our date night. If I picked the wrong restaurant I could seriously disappoint Pete, though he’d never say that. That’s when I realized why we rarely divert from our few favorite restaurants. In the words of Forest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get.” And that’s exactly what flooded my mind as we walked through the glass doors of Wok With You.

I was full of anticipation; praying that it would be good, but willing to settle for decent. We were seated right away. There were only three other couples in the restaurant, and, immediately, my mind replayed our very own restaurant nightmares. As I took in my surroundings I thought it looked nice. The walls were coated with crisp, trendy colors, and there were no gaudy decorations anywhere. I felt a familiarity that I couldn’t quite place my finger on, but brushed it aside as I kept observing. The dining area was fairly simple with concrete floors and lined rectangular tables. It felt so simple in fact that it reminded me of my high school cafeteria. I enjoyed my high school cafeteria, but that’s not what I’m going for on a nice night out to dinner. It was at that thought that the familiarity crept in again. This time I couldn’t shake it. I was hit with the feeling that I had been somewhere ridiculously similar to that restaurant before. That’s when it hit me. It reminded me of Siam in Corn Hill Landing; one of the restaurants that ended in our bad to ugly category. A restaurant whose name is scoffed at in our home. A restaurant that we vowed never to step foot in again. I jokingly mentioned this revelation to Pete and he looked at me as if I had told him he had a terminal illness. The horror of it all didn’t set in until I flipped to the back of the sushi menu and saw an advertisement for us to check out their other restaurants. There were three restaurants named, and among them was none other than Siam itself. It’s as if someone shouted an obscenity at the top of their lungs in the middle of the restaurant. Pete and I both froze, unsure what to do.

We obviously had a choice to make. Do we get up and go? They had only given us waters up to this point, so we had made no real commitment to them. Getting up would’ve been so easy. But the problem was complex. It always is with Pete and I. You see, Pete has a serious problem with making a scene, and getting up and walking out of a restaurant qualifies as making a scene. I have a serious problem with hurting people’s feelings and the wait staff standing around the door would definitely see us leave and feel bad. I was convinced of it. As we stewed in our indecision, the waitress came over to take our order. The decision had been made for us. There was no going back now. We dove in half heartedly and ordered a Coke. As we waited for the drink, we looked through our options on the menu. There were dishes like “Bang Bang Tiger Shrimp” and “Me fun,” but there was nothing next to the names to describe them. I figured the odds were already stacked against us for failure (yes, I know that’s a terribly negative outlook, but that’s what I was thinking), and ordering something that I wasn’t sure about wouldn’t necessarily end well (even if I wanted to order Me fun just because I think I AM, in fact, fun). So Pete and I went with what we knew. I ordered Udon noodles with chicken and Pete got fried rice and chicken. Neither of us was expecting much, but when the heaping piles of noodles and rice (respectively) came out, our moods lifted.

The food was delicious. We ate our entire meal with chopsticks – a feat I had never accomplished until that evening. I didn’t get a peak in the kitchen, but I was ignorantly pleased with the quality of the food. The bonus was that we only spent $22 for our entire meal (tip and all) which made up for the creepy Siam aura. Our only problem was that the aforementioned Coke that we ordered was $1.50 for a can (presented “elegantly” with a glass of ice and a paper covered straw). No refills. Lame. Free refills are a must have on date. I was extremely pleased by the prompt service, though there were no excuses not to be. There were only two to three other tables occupied besides our own. Our dinner even ended with a fortune cookie that told me my “love life will soon be happy and harmonious.” I don’t know what I’ve been living with thus far, but I look forward to what the cookie suggests. The highlight of the evening was, however, as we exited the restaurant. Pete led the way and as he turned left to say goodbye to the host hovering by the door, he leaned all his weight right into what he thought was the door. His head realized the wall wasn’t a door first. It kind of jerked back while the rest of his body parts from the neck down followed his head’s lead, only to have the same startled reaction seconds apart from one another. It was kind of like watching a vertical train wreck. I tried to contain my laughter long enough to make sure he wasn’t seriously hurt. After he told me that his ego was the only thing that had suffered serious damage the floodgates opened and for the next half an hour I entertained myself by replaying the incident over in my head and laughing just as hard as if I had just seen it happen. That one event made whatever residual stress that was left from before dissipate, for me anyway.

Upon reflection of our Wok With You experience, Pete and I decided that it could go on our “approved” Asian restaurants list. However, we came to one glaring conclusion. Our favorite place to eat Asian cuisine is, by far, Wegmans. Yes, I know it’s a grocery store, but it’s so much more (we’ll get into that in another article). Think about it. Wegmans provides cuisine as authentic as any upstate New York Asian eatery, and you can be confident about where the food comes from and how it is stored. The price is fairly right and you know what you’re getting every time. You can’t beat the variety of options from the buffet either. Oh, and did I mention it’s Wegmans? Heck, it’s like getting food from your mom’s fridge. Totally legit.

So yes, we tried a new restaurant, but I still feel like the old standbys would do just as good a job. Though they don’t have glass walls that could be mistaken for doors…

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