John's Noodle House serves Chinese food. John's Noodle House serves good food. Let's be clear about that. There's no doubt that John's Noodle House has fine noodles and an extraordinary war wonton soup.
They have, however, quite failed in their attempts to understand the concept of ambiance, a French word which means "try not to hang jade-look-alike plastic decorations up around the place with dental floss and scotch tape." It's just kind of underwhelming.
At a restaurant, one must have music. For some reason. (Is what I hear them say to each other in my mind's ear.) So they have one CD of the erhu (Chinese violin) playing soft Western favourites. It plays Edelweiss over, and over, and over again. It is never taken out of the CD tray. Ever. Edelweiss, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. I think the CD tray must be glued shut. I daren't ask. ("Could I help you unstick the CD tray?" I might enquire, and the owner lady would glare at me like I'd found a maggot in her fortune cookie, and I would never get to eat delicious war wonton soup again.)
At least they have their priorities straight. Wonton being number one, decor trailing somewhere behind no-toenails-in-the-steamed-rice.
UPDATE: WOR wonton. I meant wor wonton. Crap.
Well, to be fair, there are actually 2 or 3 other songs on the CD too. One of them being a particularly stirring version of Pachelbel's Cannon at about 1/4 tempo. Repeated exposure makes one want to drown oneself in one's wor wanton soup.
Hmmm...war wanton...another word for camp follower?
I was just at a Mexican restaurant in California that too had its priorities strictly aligned. I think they must have been worried about sensory acclimatization because they interspersed about 15 min of silence with the joyous rupture of (presumably) their favorite Mexican classic. It kind of reminded me of the Chuck E. Cheese band. In fact gigantic moving plastic dolls may have been the missing ingredient to a perfect ambiance...