a new experience

I talked The Boy into trying something new last night. No, don’t let your imagination run too wild – it was just a restaurant!

I’ve always really liked Chinese steamboat food. How it works is you sit at a table that has a big pot of broth sitting on a gas burner in the middle. You order what food you’d like, choosing from a range of meat, seafood, veges and noodles. The food comes raw, so you drop it into the broth to cook (a few pieces at a time) then eat it as soon as it’s ready. After all the food is cooked and eaten, you drink the “soup” that is left. Yummy!

The steamboat restaurant my family used to go to closed down years ago, and I’d never found another one. I was sitting in the car a couple of weeks ago, waiting for The Boy to get coffee from his new local, when I happened to see a sign that said Steamboat Restaurant. After a few loud squeals of joy, I told The Boy we had to go. Soon.

The Boy had never tried Steamboat, and was frankly quite dubious. The look on his face as we sat down and they brought the pot of broth over was classic. Nearly as good as the look on his face after the food we’d ordered arrived, nicely sliced but completely raw. The good news is that once he actually tried it he loved it, so I won’t have to struggle to get him back there.

See, Boy? Sometimes, different is good.