It is 12.30 and I really ought to be in bed. But I can't do it. Exhausted as I am, I just don't want to go to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a bitch, you can bet on that. But it is kind of Friday for me, since I'm not going back to work until Tuesday of next week.

But of course, I am too tired to do a real blog.. but I do have a story to tell about dinner tonight and the fish that got sent back not once, not twice but FIVE times ladies and gentlemen.

We (Joe, Gloria and I) went to little Saigon for dinner - it is a very nice, clean vietnamese place we'd been to before called the Hai Yeng. We all ordered something with the idea that we would share everything. Once such item was #43 - cod in black bean sauce. They didn't have #43 though, so we asked for #44, which was red snapper, and asked that it be cooked in black bean sauce instead of the ginger sauce. The server agreed and went merrily on her way.

When she returned, she had red snapper, cooked in ginger sauce. So we sent that back, asking for the sauce we'd ordered. She comes back from the kitchen with a tiny fingerbowl full of black bean paste, telling us that the sauce had a little bit of black bean in it, but we just couldn't taste it. Now, excuse me. What the hell is that? Why put something in a sauce you can't taste, and how were we supposed to believe that the light yellow sauce in front of it had ever seen a black bean? Back to the kitchen it went.

This time, it returned in a sauce made of the ginger broth used to make the fish beforehand and black bean powder. I am sure of this, because she brought out the powder to show us. The sauce was weak and runny, and exceptionally ginger-y not thick and creamy like it is supposed to be, and the fish was ice cold. So we sent it back to get nuked and de-gingered. The fish comes back to our table piping hot, but in a new, thicker sauce. I tasted it. It was now soy sauce, black beans and cornstarch in a mixture so salty that the fish was impossible to eat. Frustrated, we told the waitress to just take the fish back to the kitchen and forget about it.

She actually came back to our table five minutes later, asserting that no soy sauce or ginger had ever been used on the fish,(it was the same piece we'd been served before and I am sure of it, because Joe took a bit off the tip of it when it came to our table the first time) and that the fish was indeed smothered in black bean sauce, from the can, just as she'd showed us before. She placed the fish back on our table, which was now in a much ligher sauce and so overcooked it looked pureed. We couldn't stop laughing! Was this tiny little asian woman going to force us to eat this poor fish carcass that had been cooked in every sauce available within the span of an hour? Thankfully, the fish didn't appear on our bill (it would have been $15).

The rest of the dinner went well. My tofu and broccoli with 'shrooms was wonderful, thank you.

We did tip the waitress. I told her never to bring something back to the table that had been nuked four times. But we also gave her a sub-standard 15% (I like to tip 20%), because she was a bitch.