Brooklyn Numbing Spice
Part Food Review, Part Social Justice Critique
Brooklyn is beautiful on a Saturday morning. The neighborhoods change and weave into one another like the seasons. With snow on the ground and bright sun in the sky, I journeyed from my corner of BedStuy to a bagel shop in Clinton Hill, ambled through a collectible store in Prospect Heights and a farmer’s market in Prospect Park, eventually dropping off my walking partner in Park Slope. “Maybe I’m starting to get a hang of this ‘New York’ thing?” I thought to myself. Knowing I wouldn’t make it back for a midday meditation at HealHaus, I stopped for a self-congratulatory lunch in what’s becoming my new favorite Chinese spot.
Really Good Szechuan Chinese is, as their rap name suggests, really good. As a San Francisco transplant, I started to take great Asian food for granted. I regularly miss my haunts: late night fish fillets fresh from the tank with aparagus & black bean sauce at Yuet Lee on Stockton & Broadway. Phenomenal, Karl-the-fog-clearing pho at Sai’s Vietnamese in FiDi, and of course, the combo of hot and numbing spice found in Spices or the more famous Z&Y.
Really Good Szechuan Chinese is awesome because they have my favorite dry-fried explosive chili-pepper fish, pictured above, but also because they play the hits well. The standard American Chinese lunch fare options are good, and they do a beautiful veggie-wonton soup with vegan wontons wrapped in fresh spinach. Get you a local Chinese spot that can do both.
Given my passion for Chinese food and west coast nostalgia, I was hyped stop in RGSC for lunch. The staff are really nice, and one recognized me from my many vegan wonton soup drop-ins the past few weeks. This lazy Saturday, the restaurant was three quarters empty, so some of the staff, sitting close as family, were seated in a row enjoying meals of their own. The staff and the few regulars of which I was part had a head-nod understanding. Lunch took a turned for the distasteful, however, when an older white woman sat ahead of me, just one empty table in between, so I could see and hear the full debacle that was about to unfold.
She carried significant baggage as her lunch companion. Perhaps dining after a morning of light shopping, or nourishing her appetite before a trip to the park, herself, she selected a table and filled the opposing seat with her belongings. She ordered, in a hurried, if not overtly rude or discourteous manner. At some point, she felt a chill, and noticed she’d selected a seat directly under one of five vents in the room.
She asked if she could change seats, reasonably, and took herself to table in the corner, one table further but still directly in my view. That’s all she took, however. The lady muttered, as she changed seats, “move my things to the other table.” There were no little-old-lady pleasantries I just happened to miss. The server who was waiting the entire room while his coworkers took their lunch break looked up, and one of his coworkers in particular made a pained facial expression and lamented to the group in Chinese. I caught her glance and we raised an eyebrow in unison.
As she sat still, her things remained adjacent, coat on one chair, multiple dishes, water and utensils on table, and bags and belongings on the second chair. I felt a familiar notion of “is this clear cut racism enough to say something, or am I projecting?” Racism is known to induce paranoia, and I couldn’t tell whether the staff were caught in the same dilemma or, my suspicion, didn’t feel the authority to say something. Was it worth upsetting a customer, who could leave a bad review or might have local business sway? Maybe not, and though it certainly wasn’t anyone’s job in that restaurant to move that disrespectful elder woman’s clutter to the second table she chose, the waiter proceeded to move all of her belongings in multiple trips as she commanded. Aplomb comes naturally to the American minority.
I didn’t say anything in the moment. I didn’t want to ruin my own lunch, though I couldn’t go back to reading my book after that. I didn’t want to assume she felt entitled because she was a white lady and they were medium-English-speaking Chinese workers in an affordable Chinese restaurant. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt as a senior citizen who just gets crotchety sometimes. But walking back, and even in that restaurant, I did consider that her entitlement didn’t come from old age, but her experience through older times. She may have been equally dismissive of the workers in that Chinese restaurant as a young adult or child, and maybe moreso in the era she grew up in. She probably didn’t see anything strange about commanding restaurant workers, paid to make her food and give her food, as if they were personal servants for half hour stay. I thought that about the many Saturday mornings and afternoons multiplied by 7 that that little group in that Chinese restaurant deal with similar wholly unnecessary indignities.
More often than not, I speak up if I, myself or a friend or family member is at all attacked. I have a protective and prideful streak to me, by nature, a stubbornness that has saved me in turbulent times. But this was a rare case where something in my gut told me this was wrong, and I didn’t. I left an extra tip, I boastfully complimented the staff and exhaled that I could see they were handling a really tough Saturday morning, loud enough for the full quiet restaurant to hear me. I thought, if they’re not saying anything, maybe the worst thing for them would be if someone, me, made a big scene in the restaurant by publicly scolding a fellow customer. Maybe they’d feel that was not my place, and maybe that lady held some role I did not know such that any scolding by me would’ve hurt the very staff I was trying to help.
But that all feels — alien, to say the least. You should all grab a Szechuan crispy fish and the veggie wonton soup when you’re next in Brooklyn. Separately, consider the unsaid bullshit that service workers from immigrant backgrounds endure, and how it connects to unsaid bullshit (fancy term: microaggressions) Black folk and minorities of many walks may encounter in an otherwise beautiful, American Saturday.
