Monday, don't eat at Teriyaki Boy. Every day, don't eat at Teriyaki Boy

Pretend there was no weekend because it's hard for me to write on the weekend. I have no established routine, and I'm usually way to busy hanging out with friends and/or getting over having just hung out with friends perhaps a little too thoroughly.

This weekend featured an afternoon in the Astoria Beer Garden as part of a friend's visit up from Baltimore, so yeah, lots of recovery needed.

But this is not "Everything I Drank Yesterday" and, actually, I leave a lot of the things I drink out of the picture, mostly because these posts are really long already and if something is going to go, it sure isn't going to be the run-on sentences.

Alright, fine, breakfast, sheesh. Yogurt, Yoplait vanilla yogurt, not the best yogurt I've ever had, but a nice way to start the morning. Last week my local grocer had a sale on various brands of yogurts and I got to thinking about just how different $2 worth of yogurt could be. During the sale, the Yoplait were 3 for $2, and the La Yogurt were 5 for $2. I compared the relative value of these with the high-water mark of Stonyfield Farms whole-milk cream-on-top, which come in at $1.19 per 6oz. single serving cup. For an everyday yogurt with breakfast, the La Yogurt is a much better value without being any notably better or worse than the Yoplait. The Stonyfield Farms is a marked improvement over both if you're the sort of person to splurge on yogurt. If you're not, you're probably wondering why you are still reading this blog.

Also up to bat for breakfast was a pepperoni roll and an oatmeal cream pie, both of which had been crushed by a week or more of floating in my bag. In the case of the pepperoni roll, this made the grease-soaked portions of the bread that much more prominent as the big puffy bread on top got compressed. The oatmeal cream pie went through this strange transformation and came out more like oatmeal taffy than anything that "cream" or "pie" might bring to mind. It must have gotten hot in my bag and the icing must have melted into the rest of the sandwich a bit. Looked like hell, tasted fine.

Lunch was served by a rather rude Teriyaki Boy cashier who was not Japanese. I don't want to disparage any cultures in particular, but if this was a bento chain in Japan, I would have been treated a lot better.

I ordered the teriyaki chicken and shrimp shu mai combo. The cashier told me the combo came with soda or miso soup. Seeing as it was well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I opted for soda. She took my money. I got change. Then I stepped aside to wait for my food and complimentary soda.
As she did with me, when indicating the free soda, she gestured to her left, my right, most directly to this line of bottled waters and teas sitting above the sushi cooler. These were obviously tepid, though, and none of them were soda. As one's eyes continued left, one saw the cooler full of these bottles and also cans of soda. I wasn't sure if she gave me the soda, or if I just took the soda. I tried to ask, but she was too busy with the line and didn't show any interest in taking my question, although other patrons in line did notice me trying to ask. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to the cooler and got a brand of green tea that I enjoyed in Japan. I took my food to a corner of the tiny box that is the restaurant and sat down to eat with a Korean friend of mine.

We were about half-way through our meal when I hear "Hey you! You get tea!"


"Huh? Yeah, out of the-"

"Tea not soda. You get tea."

"Oh, my bad. What's the difference."

"The tea is $2.50."

"No, I mean, how much more is the tea than the soda? Can I just pay the difference?"

"Soda is free. Tea is $2.50."

Perhaps in reading this you think I am being unfair about her mastery of the English language. I have spent a lot of time teaching English as a second language and making close friends with non-native speakers. This woman was just excessively rude. Beyond the business self-sabotage of gouging customers over a simple mistake, her tone of voice, as well as that of the manager that came forward, was highly combative. Just because I wear a button-down and a tie to work doesn't make me some rich asshole who doesn't care about an extra $2.50 added onto my lunch budget. My own tone became a bit combative, I'm sure. I debated walking out of the restaurant, leaving the rest of my lunch and the tea, but I didn't feel like starting a big ordeal, deciding instead to pay my $2.50 rather unceremoniously and then bad mouth them on my blog.

I know New Yorker's can be ass holes, and I know white guys in ties can be really big ass holes, but the treatment I got as a customer was completely uncalled for. I wasn't being hostile. If they had said "I'm sorry for the understanding, but you did open the tea. I apologize but I can't ring up the tea with a discount. You do need to pay for the tea." I would have been in a much better mood about it, and would be a lot more likely to eat there again. Some time around the manager insisting that the soda was "free" and could not be deducted from the cost of the tea, both my friend and I, and likely several other patrons, decided not to return to this place of business again.

I know my review of the food may seem unfairly tarnished in light of my mood so allow me to simply equate it to mall food court "Japanese" food to give a slightly more objective frame of reference. At over $7 for the lunch combo, and at almost $10 dollars after this tea debacle, the lunch was a big disappointment for me. The service certainly did not remind me of the bento chains I know and love from Japan. That neither the cashier nor the manager seemed to have any interest in my feelings as a customer, and that deducting the cost of a soda from my purchase of the tea was an absolutely unreasonable request on my part, speak volumes against the character of the Teriyaki Boy chain, or at least the branch on 9th Ave between 57th and 58th Streets.

OK, I'm over it. I'll just have to make my own bento from now on. I've been looking for an excuse to try to make some tsukemono anyway. I just hope my roommates can stand the smell.

For dinner I made one of those dishes I make that I don't have a name for except for cobbling together a bunch of other food names into some unworkable lump that really doesn't give a good indication of what it is I actually made. This was a vegetarian provincial gazpacho pasta casserole. Your mouth probably isn't watering yet.

I took about 7 cloves of garlic, cut them into 1/8" thick slices and fried them in olive oil on a medium heat until they started to brown. Then I added two medium sized (about 7") zucchini, partially peeled, quartered lengthwise and then cut into chunks about 1/2" thick. I let the zucchini sautée with the garlic, dusting it with a little Adobo seasoning, and turned up the heat a bit to promote browning as I diced two of my Uncle's very large beefsteak tomatoes.
After I added the tomatoes, I seasoned the sauce with dried dill, oregano, sage, white and black pepper and a touch of cinnamon. I let the sauce simmer until the tomatoes and zucchini started to break down a bit. Then I added plain bread crumbs just until any loose moisture seemed to be soaked up.

While that was going on I made some bucatini, a hollow pasta just big enough for spaghetti to wear as a jacket. When that was done, I gave it a good rinse in cold water so that I could toss it with my hands, and so it would stop steaming, since the humidity was already over 60%. When it was just warm, I mixed in two tablespoons of butter and some black pepper. I layed the bucatini on top of the sauce and set the whole pan of it to chill in the fridge.

I also set alternating slices of another one of my uncle's tomatoes and a ball of fresh mozzarella to marinate in some balsamic vinegar.

Once the pasta was nice and cold, I cut a wedge out of the pan and flipped it out onto a plate so that the sauce was on top. I cut about 6" off an Italian baguette and made a sandwich with the marinated tomato and moz and "Voilla!" 20 minutes of actual cooking time for a great summer dinner. I'm sure you could eat it hot, but it was extremely unpleasant already. Just taking my new fan out of it's box had me dripping with sweat. This was great cold and really took the edge off the heat as well as being a very hearty vegetarian dinner.

Alright, I'm starting to sound like Rachel Ray again. I'm gonna go do a few more hours of aversion therapy. Try that pasta dish, srsly, it has a flavor.