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TGI Friday's "Well, thank God, it's Friday!" we said one evening recently at the end of a long day at our Chinese Business World website office in Beijing. "Where shall we go for dinner?" Our boss, Albert Lai, was in town from Los Angeles and we wanted to do something special. "I know, let's go to T.G.I. Friday's," I suggested. It seemed a natural. Years ago my wife and I frequented the T.G.I. Friday's in Honolulu and I had always wanted to try the branch in Beijing, which is on the Third Ring Road, south of the Great Wall Sheraton. The first thing we discovered was that a good many other people in Beijing had the same idea on this particular Friday night. The place was jam-packed, with a hostess taking names in the lobby. She warned it would be a twenty minute wait, which gave us plenty of time to look at all the kitsch on the walls. There were antique signs for gasoline and automobile tires, even a bicycle hanging near the ceiling. "What do you think that sign means?" Albert asked, pointing to a picturesque cow. "Used Cows For Sale", I read dubiously. Unfortunately, it meant nothing. It was only silliness and set decoration. We soon discovered that T.G.I. Friday's was part-theme park, part-restaurant, one of the new sort of fun eating places that are so much in vogue these days. Thirty-five minutes passed and we were led up a long staircase into a fun room, past a fun bar with a big sign overhead that said "FREE BEER TOMORROW." We ended up a table that was covered with a red striped cloth. The noise level was overwhelming and I almost expected balloons to drop from the ceiling. After sitting a few minutes, a gong went off and one of the managers announced a special drawing, the business card of the week would be pulled at random from a bowl. The winner received a 300 yuan certificate towards his dinner -- at Friday's this would not go far. On the front page of our menu, I was interested to see a notice encouraging us to tip our waiter, since no service charge would be added to the bill. I have never seen anything like this in China; in the neighborhood restaurants, there is no tipping at all, and in the fancy places ten or fifteen percent is generally added automatically. In the West, tipping is meant to encourage good service and so it was ironic, and a bit hard to figure out, why the service we experienced at Friday's was so slow and bad. Not terrible, perhaps, but we had to wait a long time to order, we had to re-order our drinks when they did not arrive, and whenever we caught our waiter, there was a sense that you had to speak quickly before he dashed off to the next table, never to return. The menu is a happy international mix of hamburgers, pizza, ribs, pasta, steak, salads, and Mexican fare. My wife and I decided to go Mexican out of sheer nostalgia. This was probably a mistake, since our permanent home is in New Mexico where there is exquisitely good cuisine. Nevertheless, I did the Chicken Fajitas, and Gail had the Chicken Enchiladas. They were not bad, but not great either. It was a generic sort of Mexican food with all the ethnicity removed. I enjoyed seeing tortillas, but they had something of an identity crisis. Thick enough to be pita bread, they seemed to be trying to make up their minds whether to be Greek or Mexican. Still, in Beijing it is a treat to eat any kind of Mexican food at all, and in it's own way, the fare was all very tasty. Unfortunately, T.G.I. Friday's is quite expensive. Our Nacho appetizer was a whopping 138 yuan. The enchiladas and fajitas were both 88 yuan a piece, Albert had the steak special for 120 yuan, and Mary the Cobb Salad for 55 yuan. The food was decent without being anything to write home about -- but of course, people don't come here for the food, they come for the atmosphere. Personally, I thought there was perhaps a little too much atmosphere. The music over the sound system was particularly loud and grating, and when I listened closely for a moment I was startled to find it was Aerobic Disco -- the kind of mechanical pop, heavy on the drum machines, that you hear in exercise classes at your health club. There was even an overly-energized voice shouting, "Reach! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven! Push! One, two, three! ..." It was a little stressful on the fajitas trying to sit quietly in my stomach. All in all, we had a great time, and I heartily recommend Friday's if you are in the right mood. For heaven's sake, don't come here if you are only in Beijing for two weeks -- there are thousands of local restaurants where the food is a hundred times better. But if you are in China for an extended time, this is an instant party, a fun escape from the everyday. And hey, if you're bored with your date, you can always do push-ups at the bar. |
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