Except when the soup arrived a few moments later, I was more than a bit disappointed. True, the bowl was enormous, and divided down the middle contained both chicken broth on one side, tom yum on the other. But that appeared to be it. Where were the prawns, chicken, fish, mushrooms and other delicious ingredients that typify tom yum? How could they call the other side chicken soup, when there was no chicken to be seen? Were we being stiffed because we were tourists, or what? This was so not what we’d planned.
"Let’s finish this, then try and find somewhere else" Joel suggested and resignedly, we began spooning the broth into our bowls.
"NO, NO, NO!" yelled Auntie and grabbing my sleeve, led me through the throng and into the restaurant proper.
That’s when I realized how this place worked. Our table was in fact a sort of outdoor grill, the bowl sitting atop a gas burner. Inside, we were free to choose from a smorgasbord of meats, vegetables, seafood and other less identifiable foodstuffs.
"You want this?" cried Auntie, pointing at a mound of mussels? "This?" at piles of shrimp. "This? This? This?" When we got to the meat section, she began to mimic the noises the animals made (or at least, made before they were sliced into small pieces) and that was worth the price of the meal in itself. On and on she went. It made no difference whether my answer was "Yes", "No" or "Just a little, please" she piled mountains of meat, seafood, vegetables, everything into an enormous bowl, the kind my Mum used to wash dishes in. It wasn’t long before I began to get really nervous about our ability to finish all this. Hungry though we were, this was a shit-load of food in any language.
A sign in English stated "Please do not waste food – we will charge for any leftovers." Charge how much? I didn’t know. Surreptitiously I began taking food out of the washing-up bowl and putting it back on the buffet, but faster than I could do that, Auntie kept shoveling the stuff back in.
I was starting to panic.
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