Fast-Food and Glocalization: Shantou and the "Faking" of Brands
My boyfriend, a transplant from the north, and I were trying to figure out what to eat for lunch. July in Shantou is really really hot. Neither of us wanted a huge lunch with a big price tag but we also wanted to find a place with air-conditioning. That particularly combination was somewhat difficult to negotiate without turning to some form of fast food (almost all of which are not indigenous to Shantou), so we compromised on the choice of a previously visited, fast-food, Japanese noodle/sushi chain. As long as you do not order the sushi, the prices are fine, at least for us.
Upon arrival we discovered that the name had been changed, but the interior design, the service and the food were exactly the same. Even the dishes and the tableware were the same and the spicy cucumbers which are provided as a side dish for the set meal still had that same flat, non-crisp flavor I remember from previous visits. I originally thought the franchise had been bought or sold off, but according to my boyfriend's best guess that was not what had happened. Lam chuckled and said that the Shantou owner must have decided that s/he had learned all there was to know from the franchise and had given up the franchise name to go it on her/his own with essentially the same operation while keeping all the money. The name was changed, but the font, the logo and all of the uniforms were so close to the original that when we first arrived outside, we had not noticed any difference. It was only when staring at the physical menu that we noticed the difference. Lam insisted that this is what must have happened even as I continued to wonder whether there had not been some sort of corporate take-over somewhere in the opaque realm of international capitalism and maybe the whole chain had changed its name as a result.
"Uh uh," Lam says, "Shantou people do this all the time." As soon as they have learned all that they can from something, they get rid of the unnecessary expenses of paying off outside consultants - like the owner of the brand - and go it on their own, substituting other cheaper, and probably more local sources of necessary supplies, like udon noodles in this case. So, now that the owner had all of the equipment, bowls, ovens, techniques, flavors, management style, aesthetics down pat, s/he no longer had to pay someone else in order to keep them up. (One could make an argument for saying that this practice is not restricted solely to Chinese people from Shantou. I've been propositioned by vendors in the streets of Beijing offering to sell me "fake Rolexes." I've even bought one. Best 5 bucks I've ever spent on a watch.) So, now I no longer had to feel guilty about the fact that my fast-food renminbi were being sent off to Japan (rather than being recirculated into the local area) or that the noodles my boyfriend was slurping had been sent frozen from someplace countries away requiring huge amounts of fossil fuels to show up in his probably locally-produced "Japanese" style plastic bowl.
Nor did I have any guilt about consuming a "faked," or knockoff brand. I cannot find it in my soul to feel bad for an international corporation which sucks money out of local places by serving people food that has been sent over thousands of kilometers and is served by people who cannot afford to eat there. Sue me. The only reason I cling to the original Oreos is that I've never found any knockoff with the same taste. The not-so-Japanese noodles tasted just fine.
Later that evening, Lam and I had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an extremely successful entrepreneur from Hangzhou who has decided that Shantou, because of its relative lack of ideological oversight, fabulous food, fresh air, good weather, and amenable "free trade" practices (read tax evasion and cronyism) is going to be his kingdom. (The area's entrenched male chauvinism is only an added plus. Nathan is exciting and fun to be around but his blindness to China's and his own patriarchal attitudes and practices is amazing. The last discussion we had about that topic started with his assumption that women had it easier than men in China and went on to explain why he was going to bring back the multiple wife paradigm. It was a fun and boisterous conversation but the words, "you're full of shit," came up more than once.) Given his position and interests, Nathan keeps his ear close to the ground to pick up high-quality local business scuttlebutt. When Lam and I mentioned our trip to the "Shantou" knock-off noodle joint, Nathan's addition was that he recently heard that the owner had never paid the franchise any money, had been using the Japanese name illegally all along, had recently gotten caught, and was forced to change the name. Thus, we've been eating at a knock-off Japanese joint for years, we just did not know it until recently. That's some fake.
In some interpretations, the Shantouzation of a Japanese noodle brand could be seen as indigenous resistance to global capitalism, a sort of victory of the local over the global, but that＊s hardly the whole story. The Shantou version of the noodle restaurant embeds itself within the same logic of late capitalism that makes the "real" Japanese chain successful, indeed, it is parasitic upon it. The local "faking" of a Japanese fast-food chain assumes a consuming, middle-class public that has the knowledge, or at least access to images, of the "original" fast-food chain (we had eaten at some in Hong Kong) or the global, "cosmopolitan," "hip," lifestyle it represents, and the money to spend to do so. Regardless of whether the place is a Japanese franchise or a Shantou knockoff, the servers still can not afford to eat there.
For Shantou people to consume globalized food, they not only have to change the way food is viewed (as part of a cosmopolitan lifestyle), they also have to train their bodies to digest it. They have to cultivate the practice of eating "non-local" or "exotic" food - a relatively new practice only recently allowed by the marketization of China＊s economy, the construction of an infrastructures of mobility, and ever increasing consumption of oil. Many of my Shantou friends not only do not enjoy non-Shantou style food, they actually cannot choke down anything else. "Chi bu xia." One of my friends made herself sick trying to eat something "western" that I had cooked. No cracks about my cooking. She was the only one that got sick. Or, at least she was the only uncomfortable enough not to be able to lie about it. Next time we went to her house. (Talk about local resistance to globalized food.)
The Shantou "fake" brand highlights some of the peculiarities of the concept of a "brand" itself and its peculiarly successful adaptability to late, post-Fordist, non-centralized, global capitalism due to its incredible mobility, a mobility dependent upon a brand＊s lack of content. If the Shantou "fake" can sell food, service, and aesthetics which are completely indistinguishable from that of the "original," than what are brands actually selling? The seduction and glamour of globalized capitalism itself? As contentless, consumable entities, brands try to teach us the logic of the capitalist regime of value that all things, even lifestyles, people, and places, can repackaged into images that can be consumed anywhere.
In the case of the Shantou/Japanese noodle joint, at the very least within the Shantou context, what we were buying was a certain non-local style of eating. The "brand" in this case was a "Japanese" noodle joint, even if, as it turns out (assuming Nathan's information is reliable, and it usually is on this sort of thing), the content (management, equipment, design, food, service) was all local. As our motivations for choosing the place in the beginning prove, the Shantou "fake" still works as a substitute for, or a change from older-style, cheap, local restaurants which serve mostly locally-caught seafood and locally-grown produce without air-conditioning. These "more indigenous" or "Shantou-style" places are much more environmentally laudable, much more supportive of a local, sustainable distribution network, and, in July, extremely uncomfortable for us "northern" types. We both sweat a lot more than many of the "locals" or, at least, "southerners" do, and at 40+ degrees Celsius, it's hard to enjoy hot food without air-conditioning. Our presence in Shantou, residents who are not considered Shantou people, and our choices about where to eat and what sort of amenities should accompany the food (air-conditioning, tea, wine, etc.) indicates how the tastes and eating practices of people designated as "outsiders" have slowly come to influence the choices available here in Shantou.
The arrival of globalized food in Shantou is not only due to us "outsiders." (I'm not quite that arrogant or that guilty.) The transformation of the eating practices of people in Shantou is also connected to the continued mobility of resident locals and their entwined relationship with overseas "locals," as well as Shantou＊s pretensions to a premier position in the global hierarchy of cities. All of these factors have influenced Shantou eaters' expanded expectations of food choice. Exotic foods, including that from other Chinese regions, Sechuan hot pot, or Beijing duck, the cuisines of other Asian countries and "western" food, both of the fast-food and the more "elegant" varieties, have gradually become both more successful and more numerous. Although as these cuisines become more economically successful in Shantou, they have also become more indigenized; chefs quickly learn to cater to palates trained on very delicately flavored, largely sea-food based, Shantou cuisine.
Does the local resistance narrative poke its head out here?
With the "Shantouization" of exotic food, however, have arisen contradictory and ambiguous discourses on the authenticity of the flavors being presented, exotic and local alike. Thus, just as "Japanese" or "western" food has become something of a brand that can be faked, "local" food or "Shantou" food has as well. While driving along Shantou's eponymously named Seaside Road in our Chinese-produced Jeep Cherokee, Lam and I passed over a bridge covering a small canal. In the inlet itself were a couple of fishing boats, complete with nets, people and baskets of seafood (crabs, shrimps, etc.). On the pavement alongside the road and on the bridge itself (I was worried about running them over) were people sitting with woven baskets of crabs. Standing over the sellers on the road, as well as reaching over the bridge＊s rails were their customers, busy looking over the seafood on offer.
"They＊re fakes," says Lam.
"Fakes? What do you mean fakes? They look like crabs to me." (If it walks like a duck...)
"No, no. no. They are crabs. They just weren't actually caught by the people selling them."
"What do I care? As long as they taste good." (I am such a philistine.)
"They weren't wild caught. Those crabs were probably cultivated."
"So?" (Again with the philistineness.)
"So, they don't taste as good."
"How do you know? Have you tried them?"
"No, but Xu Hang [a self-described local gourmet who is the source of all of Lam's best food info in Shantou] told me this."
This titillating discussion evidences many of the issues involved in the worries over eating fake food, not the least of which is the expert, local knowledge required to not only distinguish what tastes right from what does not, but to also know where and how to buy the absolutely most freshly caught items from the most authentic purveyors - or at least be hooked into local information networks enough to know whom to ask. It's not that the crabs being sold were not crabs, it's that they were not (at least allegedly) the right crabs and they (possibly) were not the crabs that they were being implicitly sold as - fresh caught that day by the sellers. Another example of ingenious Shantou brand knockoff - except what's being knocked off in this case is the assumed guarantee of freshness and quality that comes from buying locally sold and produced Shantou foodstuffs. This "faked" guarantee is thus only combated through even more "local" knowledge or networks - the reliability of which is determined by the depth of one's personal connection to the source or their general reputation. Eating truly authentic local food requires local social networks as well as local distribution possibilities.
No wonder discourses about the authenticity of other foods are so fraught with anxiety, contradiction and ambiguity. To whom would one go to for information? One of the appeals Walmart trumpets within the Chinese market, is that it guarantees "no fake brands." Can "non-local" flavors be truly "authentic" outside of the circumstances in which they evolved? Or should "Western" food in Shantou be seen as a completely separate category, like Viva Taqueria in Ithaca? Not to be simplistic, but just what, after all, does "fake" or "real" food of any exotic type taste like? Isn't it all food? Aren't I really eating it? And (not to be overly materialistic about the topic), but the Shantouized Japanese noodles did, after all, make me full. It's tempting to interperate the anxious discourses of middle-class consumers about the correctness or "trueness" of the food as an indicator of doubt as to whether "ethnic" or "regional" or "exotic" cultures/food/places can actually be branded, consumed, and moved the way that the logic of capitalism assumes. Or are these discourses echoes of essentialized, reified, bounded ideas about exotic cultures that correlate to an imperialist epistemology of "others" - a discourse that is now taken up by Shantou eaters when faced with the need to categorize what they are putting in their bodies?
Here, however, the "local" resistance narrative might have a chance to sneak back in. As a brand, "Shantou" food is associated with a certain image and style of eating where the appearance of the local is what's being sold, whether or not the restaurants are actually locally situated, locally owned (that is, by a so-referenced Shantou person), locally operated and filled with locally produced and locally caught food. According to many residents (both Shantou people and resident outsiders), however, "Shantou" food is not transportable. Even if it is only so far away as Hong Kong (6 hours) or Guangzhou (5 hours), Shantou people and others who enjoy the local cuisine insist that despite the incredibly high prices garnered by Shantou restaurants in those places (indicating the prestige factor of the cuisine), the "Shantou" food produced there cannot compare even to the cheapest of local restaurants in Shantou because the food is neither fresh enough, nor local enough to give the right flavor. So perhaps Japanese fast-food noodle joints can be faked, since after all the food was designed to be transported and prepared elsewhere to begin with, but according to many, Shantou food cannot be - assuming one ignores or avoids the fake crabs, that is. Perhaps there are some and practices things which resist branding or inclusion into the all-consuming narrative of global capitalism. I guess you＊ll have to come here to find out. How contradictory is that?
Post-Script:
For those worried about my sustainable, environmental soul＃the next day, it having rained and the temperature having dropped to a cool 35 degrees Celsius or so, Lam and I went to eat "dry noodles" in a locally famous restaurant (its long-term local reputation for quality being a guarantee of its authenticity). Going for "dry noodles" means we actually ended up consuming a clear soup with some combination of seafood, meat (we asked them to skip this part) and veggies and a separate serving of "dry noodles" - the noodles are not put in the soup itself and are instead served with a little brown sauce and some bean sprouts or pork on top. The chef cooks the food on a stall in front of you with the ingredients laid out in bowls as a method of transparency; the knowledgeable can assess whether or not everything is fresh. The customers eat on plastic fold-out tables "in" a room about the size of my mother's living room (it's a small living room, trust me) which is completely open to the outside. As predicted, there was no air-conditioning. Were the oysters, shrimps, and fish balls fake or real? Is the reputation of the place enough to guarantee its authenticity? How should I know? I'm not a local; I just live here. They sure did taste good though. Cheap too. For US $1.25 for the two of us, I'm really not sure I care.
P.P.S. Names of those other than Lam and I have been changed to protect the both the innocent and the allegedly guilty.
Upon arrival we discovered that the name had been changed, but the interior design, the service and the food were exactly the same. Even the dishes and the tableware were the same and the spicy cucumbers which are provided as a side dish for the set meal still had that same flat, non-crisp flavor I remember from previous visits. I originally thought the franchise had been bought or sold off, but according to my boyfriend's best guess that was not what had happened. Lam chuckled and said that the Shantou owner must have decided that s/he had learned all there was to know from the franchise and had given up the franchise name to go it on her/his own with essentially the same operation while keeping all the money. The name was changed, but the font, the logo and all of the uniforms were so close to the original that when we first arrived outside, we had not noticed any difference. It was only when staring at the physical menu that we noticed the difference. Lam insisted that this is what must have happened even as I continued to wonder whether there had not been some sort of corporate take-over somewhere in the opaque realm of international capitalism and maybe the whole chain had changed its name as a result.
"Uh uh," Lam says, "Shantou people do this all the time." As soon as they have learned all that they can from something, they get rid of the unnecessary expenses of paying off outside consultants - like the owner of the brand - and go it on their own, substituting other cheaper, and probably more local sources of necessary supplies, like udon noodles in this case. So, now that the owner had all of the equipment, bowls, ovens, techniques, flavors, management style, aesthetics down pat, s/he no longer had to pay someone else in order to keep them up. (One could make an argument for saying that this practice is not restricted solely to Chinese people from Shantou. I've been propositioned by vendors in the streets of Beijing offering to sell me "fake Rolexes." I've even bought one. Best 5 bucks I've ever spent on a watch.) So, now I no longer had to feel guilty about the fact that my fast-food renminbi were being sent off to Japan (rather than being recirculated into the local area) or that the noodles my boyfriend was slurping had been sent frozen from someplace countries away requiring huge amounts of fossil fuels to show up in his probably locally-produced "Japanese" style plastic bowl.
Nor did I have any guilt about consuming a "faked," or knockoff brand. I cannot find it in my soul to feel bad for an international corporation which sucks money out of local places by serving people food that has been sent over thousands of kilometers and is served by people who cannot afford to eat there. Sue me. The only reason I cling to the original Oreos is that I've never found any knockoff with the same taste. The not-so-Japanese noodles tasted just fine.
Later that evening, Lam and I had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an extremely successful entrepreneur from Hangzhou who has decided that Shantou, because of its relative lack of ideological oversight, fabulous food, fresh air, good weather, and amenable "free trade" practices (read tax evasion and cronyism) is going to be his kingdom. (The area's entrenched male chauvinism is only an added plus. Nathan is exciting and fun to be around but his blindness to China's and his own patriarchal attitudes and practices is amazing. The last discussion we had about that topic started with his assumption that women had it easier than men in China and went on to explain why he was going to bring back the multiple wife paradigm. It was a fun and boisterous conversation but the words, "you're full of shit," came up more than once.) Given his position and interests, Nathan keeps his ear close to the ground to pick up high-quality local business scuttlebutt. When Lam and I mentioned our trip to the "Shantou" knock-off noodle joint, Nathan's addition was that he recently heard that the owner had never paid the franchise any money, had been using the Japanese name illegally all along, had recently gotten caught, and was forced to change the name. Thus, we've been eating at a knock-off Japanese joint for years, we just did not know it until recently. That's some fake.
In some interpretations, the Shantouzation of a Japanese noodle brand could be seen as indigenous resistance to global capitalism, a sort of victory of the local over the global, but that＊s hardly the whole story. The Shantou version of the noodle restaurant embeds itself within the same logic of late capitalism that makes the "real" Japanese chain successful, indeed, it is parasitic upon it. The local "faking" of a Japanese fast-food chain assumes a consuming, middle-class public that has the knowledge, or at least access to images, of the "original" fast-food chain (we had eaten at some in Hong Kong) or the global, "cosmopolitan," "hip," lifestyle it represents, and the money to spend to do so. Regardless of whether the place is a Japanese franchise or a Shantou knockoff, the servers still can not afford to eat there.
For Shantou people to consume globalized food, they not only have to change the way food is viewed (as part of a cosmopolitan lifestyle), they also have to train their bodies to digest it. They have to cultivate the practice of eating "non-local" or "exotic" food - a relatively new practice only recently allowed by the marketization of China＊s economy, the construction of an infrastructures of mobility, and ever increasing consumption of oil. Many of my Shantou friends not only do not enjoy non-Shantou style food, they actually cannot choke down anything else. "Chi bu xia." One of my friends made herself sick trying to eat something "western" that I had cooked. No cracks about my cooking. She was the only one that got sick. Or, at least she was the only uncomfortable enough not to be able to lie about it. Next time we went to her house. (Talk about local resistance to globalized food.)
The Shantou "fake" brand highlights some of the peculiarities of the concept of a "brand" itself and its peculiarly successful adaptability to late, post-Fordist, non-centralized, global capitalism due to its incredible mobility, a mobility dependent upon a brand＊s lack of content. If the Shantou "fake" can sell food, service, and aesthetics which are completely indistinguishable from that of the "original," than what are brands actually selling? The seduction and glamour of globalized capitalism itself? As contentless, consumable entities, brands try to teach us the logic of the capitalist regime of value that all things, even lifestyles, people, and places, can repackaged into images that can be consumed anywhere.
In the case of the Shantou/Japanese noodle joint, at the very least within the Shantou context, what we were buying was a certain non-local style of eating. The "brand" in this case was a "Japanese" noodle joint, even if, as it turns out (assuming Nathan's information is reliable, and it usually is on this sort of thing), the content (management, equipment, design, food, service) was all local. As our motivations for choosing the place in the beginning prove, the Shantou "fake" still works as a substitute for, or a change from older-style, cheap, local restaurants which serve mostly locally-caught seafood and locally-grown produce without air-conditioning. These "more indigenous" or "Shantou-style" places are much more environmentally laudable, much more supportive of a local, sustainable distribution network, and, in July, extremely uncomfortable for us "northern" types. We both sweat a lot more than many of the "locals" or, at least, "southerners" do, and at 40+ degrees Celsius, it's hard to enjoy hot food without air-conditioning. Our presence in Shantou, residents who are not considered Shantou people, and our choices about where to eat and what sort of amenities should accompany the food (air-conditioning, tea, wine, etc.) indicates how the tastes and eating practices of people designated as "outsiders" have slowly come to influence the choices available here in Shantou.
The arrival of globalized food in Shantou is not only due to us "outsiders." (I'm not quite that arrogant or that guilty.) The transformation of the eating practices of people in Shantou is also connected to the continued mobility of resident locals and their entwined relationship with overseas "locals," as well as Shantou＊s pretensions to a premier position in the global hierarchy of cities. All of these factors have influenced Shantou eaters' expanded expectations of food choice. Exotic foods, including that from other Chinese regions, Sechuan hot pot, or Beijing duck, the cuisines of other Asian countries and "western" food, both of the fast-food and the more "elegant" varieties, have gradually become both more successful and more numerous. Although as these cuisines become more economically successful in Shantou, they have also become more indigenized; chefs quickly learn to cater to palates trained on very delicately flavored, largely sea-food based, Shantou cuisine.
Does the local resistance narrative poke its head out here?
With the "Shantouization" of exotic food, however, have arisen contradictory and ambiguous discourses on the authenticity of the flavors being presented, exotic and local alike. Thus, just as "Japanese" or "western" food has become something of a brand that can be faked, "local" food or "Shantou" food has as well. While driving along Shantou's eponymously named Seaside Road in our Chinese-produced Jeep Cherokee, Lam and I passed over a bridge covering a small canal. In the inlet itself were a couple of fishing boats, complete with nets, people and baskets of seafood (crabs, shrimps, etc.). On the pavement alongside the road and on the bridge itself (I was worried about running them over) were people sitting with woven baskets of crabs. Standing over the sellers on the road, as well as reaching over the bridge＊s rails were their customers, busy looking over the seafood on offer.
"They＊re fakes," says Lam.
"Fakes? What do you mean fakes? They look like crabs to me." (If it walks like a duck...)
"No, no. no. They are crabs. They just weren't actually caught by the people selling them."
"What do I care? As long as they taste good." (I am such a philistine.)
"They weren't wild caught. Those crabs were probably cultivated."
"So?" (Again with the philistineness.)
"So, they don't taste as good."
"How do you know? Have you tried them?"
"No, but Xu Hang [a self-described local gourmet who is the source of all of Lam's best food info in Shantou] told me this."
This titillating discussion evidences many of the issues involved in the worries over eating fake food, not the least of which is the expert, local knowledge required to not only distinguish what tastes right from what does not, but to also know where and how to buy the absolutely most freshly caught items from the most authentic purveyors - or at least be hooked into local information networks enough to know whom to ask. It's not that the crabs being sold were not crabs, it's that they were not (at least allegedly) the right crabs and they (possibly) were not the crabs that they were being implicitly sold as - fresh caught that day by the sellers. Another example of ingenious Shantou brand knockoff - except what's being knocked off in this case is the assumed guarantee of freshness and quality that comes from buying locally sold and produced Shantou foodstuffs. This "faked" guarantee is thus only combated through even more "local" knowledge or networks - the reliability of which is determined by the depth of one's personal connection to the source or their general reputation. Eating truly authentic local food requires local social networks as well as local distribution possibilities.
No wonder discourses about the authenticity of other foods are so fraught with anxiety, contradiction and ambiguity. To whom would one go to for information? One of the appeals Walmart trumpets within the Chinese market, is that it guarantees "no fake brands." Can "non-local" flavors be truly "authentic" outside of the circumstances in which they evolved? Or should "Western" food in Shantou be seen as a completely separate category, like Viva Taqueria in Ithaca? Not to be simplistic, but just what, after all, does "fake" or "real" food of any exotic type taste like? Isn't it all food? Aren't I really eating it? And (not to be overly materialistic about the topic), but the Shantouized Japanese noodles did, after all, make me full. It's tempting to interperate the anxious discourses of middle-class consumers about the correctness or "trueness" of the food as an indicator of doubt as to whether "ethnic" or "regional" or "exotic" cultures/food/places can actually be branded, consumed, and moved the way that the logic of capitalism assumes. Or are these discourses echoes of essentialized, reified, bounded ideas about exotic cultures that correlate to an imperialist epistemology of "others" - a discourse that is now taken up by Shantou eaters when faced with the need to categorize what they are putting in their bodies?
Here, however, the "local" resistance narrative might have a chance to sneak back in. As a brand, "Shantou" food is associated with a certain image and style of eating where the appearance of the local is what's being sold, whether or not the restaurants are actually locally situated, locally owned (that is, by a so-referenced Shantou person), locally operated and filled with locally produced and locally caught food. According to many residents (both Shantou people and resident outsiders), however, "Shantou" food is not transportable. Even if it is only so far away as Hong Kong (6 hours) or Guangzhou (5 hours), Shantou people and others who enjoy the local cuisine insist that despite the incredibly high prices garnered by Shantou restaurants in those places (indicating the prestige factor of the cuisine), the "Shantou" food produced there cannot compare even to the cheapest of local restaurants in Shantou because the food is neither fresh enough, nor local enough to give the right flavor. So perhaps Japanese fast-food noodle joints can be faked, since after all the food was designed to be transported and prepared elsewhere to begin with, but according to many, Shantou food cannot be - assuming one ignores or avoids the fake crabs, that is. Perhaps there are some and practices things which resist branding or inclusion into the all-consuming narrative of global capitalism. I guess you＊ll have to come here to find out. How contradictory is that?
Post-Script:
For those worried about my sustainable, environmental soul＃the next day, it having rained and the temperature having dropped to a cool 35 degrees Celsius or so, Lam and I went to eat "dry noodles" in a locally famous restaurant (its long-term local reputation for quality being a guarantee of its authenticity). Going for "dry noodles" means we actually ended up consuming a clear soup with some combination of seafood, meat (we asked them to skip this part) and veggies and a separate serving of "dry noodles" - the noodles are not put in the soup itself and are instead served with a little brown sauce and some bean sprouts or pork on top. The chef cooks the food on a stall in front of you with the ingredients laid out in bowls as a method of transparency; the knowledgeable can assess whether or not everything is fresh. The customers eat on plastic fold-out tables "in" a room about the size of my mother's living room (it's a small living room, trust me) which is completely open to the outside. As predicted, there was no air-conditioning. Were the oysters, shrimps, and fish balls fake or real? Is the reputation of the place enough to guarantee its authenticity? How should I know? I'm not a local; I just live here. They sure did taste good though. Cheap too. For US $1.25 for the two of us, I'm really not sure I care.
P.P.S. Names of those other than Lam and I have been changed to protect the both the innocent and the allegedly guilty.