Wonderful Chinese Express

Wow. How am I to understand the name of this restaurant? Is it supposed to describe a Chinese train that is also wonderful or a place where I can purchase Chinese people and receive them quickly? Unfortunately, it is neither.

Wonderful Chinese Express is my latest attempt at palatable quick eats in the Orlando area. It is located here, in Altamonte Springs, Florida. It was another case where my sense of adventure trumped my common sense. I went there around dinner time and there were no other customers. The interior is that of a normal fast eats Chinese restaurant. The customer orders from the counter and waits for his food. The only thing that I noticed that deviated from this standard formula was the apparent disdain they had for their built-in, backlit signs…they were blank. Instead, and what, in hind sight, suited the experience, were cardboard and plywood signs, lettered by hand, in Sharpie. Class. As my sense of foreboding grew, I looked at their paper menus.

It looked, again, like a standard quick Chinese restaurant menu. There only appeared to be 4 of these menus in the whole restaurant, but I was somewhat comforted by seeing their catch phrase along the bottom:

You never tasted Chinese food this good!

Once Tried, Always Loved!!

It looked as if they added some sort of agent to the food that when eating and chanting the above mantra, cause a compulsion to return. Whew, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about not liking it.  Too bad for me, that wasn’t the case.

I ordered General Tso’s Chicken with fried rice and awaited my fate. The menu claimed that the General Tso’s Chicken was made with white meat and was “Chunks of boneless chicken sauteed with minces scallions and hot peppers”.

This was the variety of Generals Tso’s Chicken that was made with green peppers and carrots instead of broccoli. What, you haven’t had that type yet? Well, I’ll save you the effort of a quest…don’t bother. The chicken appeared to be cuts of white meat, but there no scallions and definitely no hot peppers. The taste was less exciting than a long term metronome accuracy contest. In fact, a man with no tongue would not be envious of me. To be fair, I did not ask for the dish to be spicy. I made the common error of assuming that because hot peppers were listed in the ingredient list and that there was a little stylized hot pepper printed next to the dish’s description in the menu, that I would not have to verify that the dish was, in reality, spicy.

The fried rice was a non-event. Now, by non-event, I do not mean that there was an event, but it was not exciting. I mean it was as if there was a negative event that was sucking all the interesting parts out of surrounding events and feeding them to the insatiable Void. When one thinks of Chinese style fried rice, one usually thinks of white rice, fried up until brown (or colored yellow) and with small chunks of vegetables, usually onion, scallion, and possibly carrots, and usually, but not always, some sort of meat. Also accompanying the stereotypical fried rice is a flavor reminiscent of fried food…it being fried rice and all. Not this rice. This rice had no other discernible particle of food that was not rice. Nor was the color of the rice brown. It was some sort of graying yellow…similar to what would happen if King Tutankhamun’s mummy got a mustard stain on his brand new wrappings and archaeologists are just now finding said stain.  The fried rice was so bland, it was as if it were sucking flavors from my tongue of past meals and also feeding them to aforementioned Void.

All this, for only $10 with a drink.

Needless to say, I won’t be going back there.