The Comforts of Western Food

Anne and I decided that we wanted a little slice of home so we went to Pizza Hut. Little did we know that we would have probably felt more at home ordering Chinese take-out. To start with, the Pizza Huts in Shanghai are nice sit down restaurants. The kind you would usually see only for an upscale restaurant in the US. We found this quite amusing. As we looked over the menus we enjoyed the song “Girl from Ipanema” being played in the background. Unfortunately for us this song was on a continuous loop for the hour or so that we were at the restaurant. Like McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut had added a couple local favorites to there menu. Mmm… Octopus, Shrimp, and corn pizza with a mysterious white sauce (I don’t believe it was Alfredo). Tempting, but we decided we would just like a sausage and mushroom pizza. Oh, how foolish are we. You see, a sausage and mushroom pizza was not on the menu and making changes, additions, or deletions to the menus in most of the restaurants is a request that will result in the waiter looking at you like you asked if the restaurant also sold flights to the moon. The typical waiter’s response to this is “hmm would you like” – followed by pointing to something on the menu that is something close to what you asked for. The other response that is common is the, “let me ask” approach. This results in the waiter wondering around, usually for a couple of minutes, only to come back and say no and point to something on the menu again. A bit frustrated, but determined to enjoy our meal we picked something on the menu and called it a day. Once the pizza arrived we were disappointed to find out that there was practically no marinara sauce on the pizza. Anne asked the waiter for more sauce. This resulted in more wondering and then the response of explaining to us what marinara sauce was and that it would cost more. We decided asking questions at this point wasn’t really helping. As we enjoyed our pizza we talked about how it was weird that a western company, likely catering to the 500,000 or so expatriates (what you call Anne and I) living in Shanghai, could be so unwestern . As we were talking, another Western couple sat at the booth behind ours. To our amusement the exact same scenario played out in full.