Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Ghost Restaurant

A Vietnamese noodle soup restaurant in my neighborhood went out of business a year ago. My city relies on letter grades posted in each restaurant's front window that display their health department score for all to see. This place almost always had a "grade pending" sign, which is the equivalent of a sign saying ,"We just set off a bug bomb after the Department of Health threatened to shut us down for repeated violations, but due to the letter of the law we can stay open." So after a year, I noticed today it was open again. I stopped in. All the same people were working there and the menu was the same. But the tables were all a bit shorter. And the menus were printed on different paper. My pho arrived with red peppers instead of green. The floating meat in the was more raw than usual. It was good, but now I'm worried that I'll walk past the storefront tomorrow and it'll be boarded up again, and then some nice Vietnamese man will tell me that it never reopened. And that's when I'll have to worry about aliens hatching out of my stomach.

No comments:

Post a Comment