Sizzling
August 23, 2002
‘There’s got to be somewhere we can eat,’ moaned Adam, as we trudged our way around the block for the third time.
Yes, even though we live on a street renowned for its higgeldy-piggeldy range of international cuisine which can result in varying stages of bowel problems; we are never able to agree where to eat should we wish to do so.
In fact, our indecision becomes such a problem that we usually end up walking up the entire length of the street more than twice, just to remind ourselves of our options. On Oxford Street, this does little more than make you look like a boy prostitute and his pimp eyeing up potential customers, rather than two slightly lost and hungry fellas.
The odd situation is that Oxford Street is completely dead on a Tuesday night, as I guess you’d expect. However, Adam and I had never seen Oxford Street like this before. It’s kinda unnerving when it’s one of the city’s biggest nightspots, all the nightclubs are closed and only a newsagent and kebab shop are still open for business.
‘How about here,’ Adam prodded me in the ribs, pointing to the same Chinese takeaway we always end up at when we can’t decide where to eat.
‘Okay,’ I sighed. ‘But this time I’m getting something different.’ We always do seem to be rather stuck in our ways when we order from this particular outlet.
I scanned the photographs of dishes, discoloured from extended exposure to the sun. By that I mean the photographs were discloured, but by the looks of some of the tepid food sitting under the counter, it may very likely have been the food as well.
In the end, I decided on “Sizzling Black Bean”, expecting it to be little more than your regular beef and black bean sauce with rice. That would do me fine.
We ambled over to a sticky plastic table, and pulled the plastic chairs out from underneath it. I made sure that I pulled mine out in such a fashion that it made that draggy plastic chair barking noise. Don’t you love that noise? BARRRRK!
In fact, I pulled my chair in and out a number of times just for the pure satisfaction of it. While we patiently waited for our food, I paged through a copy of Men’s Health, the closeted gay man’s version of Cosmopolitan.
Finally, our food arrived. Plonked in front of me was a steaming, audibly sizzling pile of chunky meat, with no rice or vegetables in view. Just a heaving pile of beef.
Eyeing it off suspiciously, I tentatively raised a fork of a morsel of meat to my mouth. Once it was in there, the alarm bells began ringing.
Quite simply, this was the hottest thing which had ever been in my mouth. Rude jokes not included.
The “sizzling” part of the dish’s name was certainly not wrong. I couldn’t swallow the meat for fear that I would damage a vital internal organ. Sitting there breathing loudly with my mouth open (and wishing that I had have ordered a drink after all), I gasped and swallowed the searingly hot meat down my throat. All the way down I could feel a trail of oily, sizzling awfulness.
‘That was the fucking hottest piece of meat I’ve ever eaten!’ I wanted to exclaim to Adam, but because my mouth was burnt from the meat, it came out as ‘Thuck thuck hotteth meat aggth!’ In the midst of the agony, I was thrashing around enough for my plastic chair to make that BARRRRK noise again.
‘Just blow on it,’ explained Adam tiredly. ‘And hurry up. You always eat so slow. I don’t want to be here all night.’
So now I had the added compound of Adam’s impatience to deal with. Looking at my plate of beef sizzling in front of me, I decided to blow on it for a good few minutes before shoveling it into my gob. And the same result! Tears streamed down my face as I praised the Lord I’d taken a seat facing the back of the restaurant, so nobody could see the awful faces I was pulling (it was at this point I remembered that the restaurant had mostly mirrored walls, so I was actually on display for everyone’s amusement).
“AAAAAAAAGH!” I breathed loudly, and tried to recover. I decided to leave the meal for a few minutes, and explained to Adam my predicament. He shrugged and continued to happily eat his own, non-magma-temperatured chicken meal.
Looking carefully at my food, it appeared to have stopped sizzling for now. The coast seemed to be clear. Stabbing a substantial amount of beef onto my fork, I looked at it carefully. Definitely no sizzle.
I scoffed the entire mound of meat into my mouth, and grimly realised that it was indeed still sizzling, and this time my entire mouth was crammed full of the agony. My eyes squinted up in pain and I briefly entertained the idea of spitting the food out and screaming loudly.
In fact I did more than entertain the idea, I executed it.
Adam looked at me with horror as I raced over behind the counter, and grabbed a horrified-looking chef’s shoulder.
‘You cannot make food this hot and INFINITELY SIZZLING!’ I squealed at him, although it all came out rather indecipherable due to my predicament.
‘Don’t you know how hot this is??’ I continued. ‘Do you know what it’s like to have food sizzling like that in your mouth? I’LL GODDAMN SHOW YOU HOW HOT AND SIZZLING IT IS!’
And with that, I forced his face down onto the giant frying surface in front of him, until his face began making the same sizzling noise that my tongue was only a few moments ago.
‘No more sizzling food,’ gurgled the chef in agreement, with what was left of his vocal chords. ‘Thank you for bringing this to my attenagalalagh.’ (That was when the searing oil burnt through to the contracted muscle of his throat).
So I’ve done a community service for everyone. You can safely eat Chinese food on Oxford Street now – and when you do, you can chew in remembrance of the pain everyone suffered to achieve this.
