ah, the chinese restaurant. so glad they didn’t call it feng shui, or the tao of something and stuck with this simple, catchy name. and here we are, me, sampaafulhu, nadheemadhi, and our friend abdurrahman. it’s the old oishii near MPL, if you must know and as yet the restaurant has no social media presence. but we’ve finally made it, after months of planning. whew.

let’s rewind to an hour earlier when i was at home and impatient for abdurrahman to get ready. he’d come over to ours to shower after gym, saving him a trip to hulhumale and back. the girls wanted me to stay and not leave abdu alone cos it was rude or something. they’d share pics of the menu they said. we weren’t having any shell fish or seafood because they made abdurrahman break out in hives. even now he was in the final phase of recovery from a bad golha riha. at the height of it he said he could feel the histamines surging through his eyes. and they had puffed up like a frog’s.
the girls sent me photos and as i browsed, i got a message with their selection:

1 braised eggplant
1 duck in hot pot
1 black fungus salad
1 fried rice with egg
1 fried rice noodles with three shreds
1 beef sliced mala style

‘i’m fine with this,’ i told samfa, even if for simplicity’s sake because the menu was vast. and then abdu came, ready for the night so we got ourselves cycle taxis and off we went.

and now, in the cavernous interior upstairs, the server brings our food to the huge circular dining table. not quite half an hour since the order. the girls and abdu immediately go for the duck hot pot, ignoring the server’s instruction to wait five minutes.

‘my god, this broth!’ says nadheemadhi.

‘wonderful!’ says sampaafulhu, eating it out of the bowl like soup. ‘the potatoes are undercooked though.’

‘didn’t they say to wait a bit?’ i say but i am ignored.

meanwhile, the braised eggplant is greasy and sweet. the fungus is a little sour, garlicky and very meaty. samfa isn’t letting me have any of the rice, leaving me with the noodles which is just as well because it’s fucking good.

‘i think i’m having an allergic reaction to something,’ says samfa but struggles to shove even more food down her tiny throat.

and all this time we were worried about abdu and refraining from ordering the sea snails and the crab.

and everything is truly sensational here, i can’t stress that enough. except maybe the beef which is a bit too bland. not their fault tho.

‘it’s like a beef garudhiya,’ says abdu.

‘geri garudhiya,’ i say. samfa snorts.

‘there’s so much fat on the duck. and not enough meat’ she says.

‘you know, fingering the duck,’ comes abdu’s voice from the distance. ‘reaps more benefits.’ the man holds a piece of duck in his dark-skinned hands like a trophy. who even talks like that?

in the end we are uttterly stuffed. there’s still quite a bit of leftover food. lots of beef, too, but we decide to ignore that.

‘we should get them to put the leftovers in a container,’ says abdu.

‘one of those containers?’ i say pointing at MPL. abdu looks blank.

‘i still don’t feel too well,’ says samfa.

‘maybe it’s the msg,’ says nadheemadhi.

‘what exactly does msg do anyway?’ asks samfa.

‘gives you cancer,’ says nadheemadhi.

‘oh,’ goes abdu grinning at me. ‘i JUST got your joke!’

as we leave, nadheemadhi points to the stacks of sauce crowding the first floor.

‘what’s in those seven thousand bottles?’ goes samfa.

‘oyster sauce,’ laughs nadheemadhi.

outside, samfa gets her iphone to translate the chinese name of the restaurant.

‘vegetable,’ says her phone, leaving two characters untranslated. she runs them through and gets ‘in your dish.’

very cryptic, these chinese.