le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com
CHEAP EATS Coach’s dad said it was the best Chinese restaurant in the world. The world being a pretty big place, and one which includes all of China, we went. Him, her, me, Hedgehog, Indiana Jake, and a Random Texan.
Daly City. Koi Palace. Pffft.
I’d retract that last little almost involuntary and entirely uncomplex sentence in deference to Mr. Coach, him being a respected figure among us, but come to find (over appetizers) that he didn’t say it was the best Chinese restaurant in the world; some guy did.
Some guy in an interview on NPR, turns out. He had eaten at 5,000 Chinese Restaurants (which is a lot, by even my standards) and Koi Palace in Daly City was his favorite.
OK. If that guy wants to take me there and order what he ordered, I’ll go back. But I happen to consider myself the High Halushki of Hyperbole, and I’m here to tell you that, no matter what Coach’s dad told Coach he heard some guy tell some interviewer, Koi Palace isn’t even the best Chinese restaurant in Daly Goddamn City, let alone the Bay Area, let alone the big fat world.
Why, it’s not even cheap! The kind of portions and quality you pay $8-10 for at the best Chinese restaurants in my world, you can expect to pay $16-18 for at Koi Palace.
And that, in a nutcase, is why I don’t listen to the radio.
Come to think of it, though, the pork and oysters clay pot…
(continued later this page, after sports section)
CHEAP SPORTS
by Hedgehog
Next week I’ll have an actual pickup baseball game to write up. This week, though, I attended my first ever flag football practice. While it’s true that I already broke my arm at a flag football game, I had never actually practiced before. Which evens out since the practice I attended this week was for a team I don’t play on. I don’t play flag football anymore. Or ever. Since I broke my arm just thinking about playing once. Did I mention my arm is broke? Well it is.
Turns out, once you have a broken arm, there isn’t much you can do at a flag football practice. In the beginning, I tried kicking a soccer ball around, and the team initially joined me but finally got wise to my distractions and pulled out the pigskin.
So then I snapped the ball to Stringbean while the rest of the team ran passing routes. And then the Chicken Farmer and I played defense while the offense ran plays. Every play, one of us would blitz Stringbean and the other would drop into pass coverage. But whichever job I had, I kept putting my broken hand up to block the ball, so I decided it was safer to pull that arm into my shirt and run one-armed.
But when I blitzed Stringbean like that she just stopped and laughed and said I was the most “unintimidating” thing she’d ever seen.
She’ll rue the day.
(continued from before the sports section)
…was pretty good. And the seafood noodles, I thought, were great. But the country vegetables and the eggplant dishes were boring, the pork cheeks were at least as weak, and the spicy chicken wasn’t spicy. At all.
But mostly how I can tell when I really don’t like a restaurant is I wake up in the middle of the night that night, not feeling sick so much as cheated. Or maybe disturbed would be a better way to put it.
I have nightmares.
My mouth gets awful.
I mean no disrespect to Coach’s dad, who I kind of idolize because his whole family pretty much breathes football — with the possible exception of Coach herself, who is in it for the babes — but I’ve been so thrown by Koi Palace that I might need to go find some dollar-fifty steam-table fried rice for lunch. By way of a reset.
KOI PALACE
Lunch: Mon-Fri 11am-2:30pm; Sat 10am-3pm; Sun 9am-3pm; Dinner: Sun-Thu 5-9:30pm; Fri-Sat 5-10pm
365 Gellert Blvd., Daly City
(650) 992-9000
AE,D,MC,V
Full bar