GUESS WHAT. My wife, my wife, the great Crawdad de la Cooter, gets to teach a class on marriage. Now naturally, being a fine upstanding member of our all-around advanced society, she's insecure as a brick bug in a henhouse. And this is in general, in an average everyday sort of way, just like the rest of us. Give her a class to teach on a subject like marriage and of course you're going to have anxiety attacks and nervous breakdowns. Tell you what – and this is what I was trying to tell Crawdad over dinner last night – anyone who goes into such a situation confident and relaxed is either (a) a pompous ass, or (b) not married. Either way, they're unqualified.

In fact, I can't think of a person on this planet better qualified to teach the class or write the book on marriage than my wife. Greatness in bed notwithstanding, I'm a hard guy to live with. Home all the time.... When I'm not not making money with my writing, I'm not making money by making steel drums that nobody in their right mind will ever buy. That's a loud hobby. And, though I call myself a housewife, I rarely cook, the apartment's a mess, and I tend to prefer chickens to children.

But enough about me. We're fixing to celebrate our fifth anniversary, which is customarily, if I remember correctly, the 49ers Stuff anniversary. Five years. That's saying something. This was my point at dinner last night. Fifty years is 50 years, and 5 years is 5 years, and either amount of years of being tied at the soul to another human being is quite an incredible accomplishment.

"How do you like the pot stickers?" I said.

"I like them," she said.

I didn't.

We got over it. See? The newlyweds and engaged couples in Crawdad's class will have this pot sticker experience of ours to learn from, and grow.

But speaking of newlyweds ... I was raised Catholic, right? Which I'm almost recovered from, but back when I was in my late teens, just getting started, one of my little brothers, Dave, asked me to be his confirmation sponsor. "Dave, I'm an angry punk rock teenager and an atheist and anarchist," I said. I said the same thing exactly to my older sister when she asked me, around the same time, to be her third kid's godfather.

"Why'd you call me Dave?" she said.

And they both insisted that whatever else I was, I was a good person, in my own unique way, and that was good enough for them. So I have a godson, Tom, age 21, in North Carolina, and a sort-of-a-godson-only-more-important-because-he-picked-me-himself, Dave, age 35, in Missouri; and thanks to my constant vigilance and support, in accordance with my good personmanship (in my own unique way), neither one is vegetarian!

How this ties together with the rest of this restaurant review is they both contact me – one by mail, one by phone – the day before yesterday to say they got married. Dave and Tom. Dave and Simone, Tom and Molly. Separately, coincidentally, out of the blue, and unexpectedly. Without my blessing, I might add, but without anyone else's blessing either, to their credit.

Dave and Simone have been living together for, oh, 15 years. Tom and Molly just met four months ago. Any one of the four of them can teach a class on marriage, as of the day before yesterday, because now they're in it. And any one of the four of them would be freaking out, I'm sure, over the prospect of teaching that class. By virtue of which fact, along with their in-it-ness, they are qualified, Crawdad. Not overqualified, but not underqualified either.

"How do you like the garlic string beans with pork?"

"Hate it," she said.

I thought it was OK. Anyway, we worked it out. And I don't think it's too soon to tell you where we were. In the Castro. We needed coffee (Castro Cheesery) and reckoned we would walk around that neighborhood until we found somewhere neither one of us had ever eaten. That was the first place we saw, hiking in from Noe Valley: China Court, corner of 19th Street and Castro. It's a delightful little place with high ceilings dangle-draped with droopy swoops of orange cloth. Then each table is enclosed in its own latticed little houselike thing, roof and all, made out of rattan or bamboo or something. Very cozy.

And friendly. We agreed on this, me and my wife. Two things: that the wontons in the wonton soup were delicious, and even if the food had been all-out awful, we would still go back on account of how dang nice everyone was.

MORAL: Be nice.

China Court. 599 Castro (at 19th St.), S.F. (415) 626-5358. Lunch: Mon.-Fri., noon-3 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5-10:30 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout available. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible. Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).