Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Lunch Confession Part 2

OK, I'm back from lunch at Pei Wei. As I said earlier, I think was the last person in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area to have never eaten at this ubiquitous chain. Met a friend there for lunch today, so now I'm no longer a virgin. And that doesn't sound right at all.

Pei Wei isn't bad. It's quick and easy to order, which is always a good thing. I had something called Thai Dynamite - basically, crispy chicken and rice with carrots and red peppers. Marked as "spicy" on the menu. The brown rice was a little dry and didn't have much flavor. The veggies were yummy, the chicken was just OK. The sauce was tasty, but I would have liked more of it - the rice could have used the extra moisture. The dish was fairly spicy, but not really "hot." I probably could have asked for more heat when I ordered it, but I didn't think about it. Anyway, you never really know what a restaurant means when it says "hot." I do like spicy food, but there's no point frying your tongue on something you've never tasted before.

It's not the cheapest lunch in town, and the portion wasn't exactly generous for the price. In my mind, a meal at an Asian restaurant should allow you to do one of two things: Gorge yourself, or take home enough for a second meal. I didn't do either. I didn't quite eat the whole thing, but there wasn't enough left to box up. Besides, I don't think that brown rice was going to get any less dry by reheating.

Still, it was a fun lunch. My friend and I got the exact same freaking fortune in our cookies! How does that even happen? Poor quality control at the fortune cookie factory, I guess.  Which reminds me of one of my all-time favorite jokes from "The Simpsons":



Anyway, my cheap-ass cell phone camera couldn't take a decent picture of it, but our common fortune said "Your example will inspire others." Which is pretty funny, because Paul and I were picking each other's brains on the subject of personal branding through blogging. And it was a much more interesting conversation than I just made it sound. Even if it weren't, I love to talk about my blog and about other people's plans for their blogs, which always seem way better than mine.

Paul is pretty high on Hugh MacLeod's book "Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination." You can read bits of it on the author's blog, or order it from Amazon, or borrow a copy from a friend who overpaid for it while stranded at an aiport, which is what I intend to do.

I've read the bits of "Evil Plans" that you can find online. MacLeod's blog also expounds at length on the general topic of achieving personal success, which to him is all about "global microbranding." Like most self-help books, he's got a good idea and some good ideas about his good idea, and he goes on about them in a rarefied and self-involved way. I'm not a huge fan of self-help books. It's an organic by-product of having worked for a self-help author for almost a decade. Remind me to write about it some time.

To sum up:  Lunch with a friend today. Had some great conversation, tried a new (to me) restaurant (which I'll rate 2.5 shot glasses out of a possible 5), and got out of the office for an hour. That calls for another of my favorite jokes from "The Simpsons":



And no, a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters have nothing to do with blogging. Or do they?

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