Waiter, there’s too much food on my table

There is a restaurant where you get rewarded for being a nice customer.

Or at least, for being a customer who is nice enough to take time out to talk to the waiter about our HTC Touch phone which he was eye­ing and want­ing to ask about. When Naomi obliged by say­ing a cou­ple of things about the phone and show­ing off the use-your-thumb to flick through the inter­face thing, the waiter (sorry dude, didn’t ask your name) pulled out a chair and sat with us to talk about the phone further.

I learned a cou­ple of things as we chatted.

First, that cus­tomers are sel­dom as friendly as we were last night, and they wouldn’t take the time to explain a phone’s func­tions to a waiter, said the waiter.

Sec­ond, that you need to press the but­ton on top of the phone when you make or take a call, so your cheek won’t any­howly press the touch screen’s buttons.

But, no, it’s not because we were given a hefty ‘friendly cus­tomer’ dis­count that I’m plug­ging The Rice Table Indonesian Restaurant. I'm mentioning it because the food's really quite good, and you get a lot of it for $20 per person.

Rijstaffel is the Dutch word for Rice Table, and it used to be popular only in the Netherlands.

At a rijstaffel restaurant, small portions of twenty different dishes are plonked on your table for you to eat yourself to death. You will like about 13 to 14 of those dishes, and then you will eat yourself to death. That's how the Indonesians fought off the Dutch in their war of independence. They fed most of their colonial masters to death in 1945 and the surviving Dutch went home to legalise marijuana and prostitution.

If you must know, I learnt history from watch­ing beauty pageants.

Tech­no­rati Tags: rijstaffel, rice table, indone­sian, <a href=“http://www.technorati.com/tag/food” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://www.technorati.com’]);urchinTracker(“/outbound/www.technorati.com’);” rel=“tag”>food, <a href=“http://www.technorati.com/tag/singapore” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://www.technorati.com’]);urchinTracker(“/outbound/www.technorati.com’);” rel=“tag”>singapore