Just a few thoughts-restaurants

ice cream sundae at Andy's Pizza

McPuisor anyone  ?

German style menu

Nice music with supper

A good place to take a date.

ai yai yai !

Sylvia enjoying a gyro plate at Opah's

Restaurants.  While in Moldova, I have had the chance to try several different types of restaurants.  Some served food that would be naturally American favorites like pizza.  Others served the more traditional Moldovan food like placinta, sarmale, zeama, pui si porc.   Some places had an ethnic bent like Opa Greek Tavern Restaurant or the Flying Pig (German).  Andy’s Pizza was a chain restaurant that served not only pizza, but also other American favorites like hamburgers, fries, and shakes.  Some restaurants had a very “continental” or European type of menu.  There were funny combinations of images such as the kebab place called “Dos Amigos” that served strictly kebabs in a tex-mex atmosphere.

What’s a kebab?  It’s not grilled meat on a skewer.  That’s figaruri or the Russian word scashlick.  A kebab is a large tortilla like circle that is filled with meat, grated cabbage and carrot, chopped pickle, and French fries.  A few sauces are added…maybe a yogurt garlic or a tomato spicy sauce.  Then the large flour envelope is folded up like a big burrito and pressed in a two sided grill to toast it a bit. 

One complaint about restaurants in general here is that service is unpredictable.  Sometimes waiters take a long time to getting around to taking your order.  Then it’s very possible that the food will come out to the table in dribbles, one person gets a meal, then another, then another.  The timing in between can be uncomfortable.  The waiters are also very insistent on cleaning away unneeded things from the table such as your paper napkin.  Leave it alone on your table a second and it is gone.  But when it is time to get the bill so you may leave, the waiter is hard to find. 

The average American would find some things quite different in restaurants.  Coffees are a single serving.  If you want a second coffee, you don’t get a refill, you pay for a second coffee.  Coffee American is something like an “expresso” that has double the amount of water added to it and that only fills a smallish cup to half full.  Some coffee shops have become very successful because they serve coffees more like Starbucks.  In fact, one of the favorite PC restaurants is TUCANO’s.  It’s marketing image is a Tucan.  It’s business model is very much like a Starbucks.  It has a variety of food items including breakfast, salads, sandwiches, bakery, fresh fruit.  The staff has been trained in customer service and often many of them can handle English.  The muzak is American and the walls are covered with pictures of people from other countries around the world.  The prices are also a little more American, ie expensive.  But when you sat in a Tucano restaurant, you felt like you were “back home” in America.

One of my favorite restaurants was in Orhei and it is called “LaStrada”.   I went there almost every Sunday after church and met other PC’s who lived in Orhei for lunch.  We became “regulars” and the waiters knew what we’d order before we said it.  We usually had the Caesar salad or other type of salad and a hot drink like tea or coffee.  It was a pretty good deal for 60 lei.  The absence of fresh lettuce from the Moldovan diet made the salads even more attractive.  Sometimes I would order “clatite cu fructe padurei” which are like crepe pancakes.  sometimes they reminded me of a smiley face pancake breakfast, including whipped cream.

I remember once I was reading the menu for other small appetizers and I thought I was ordering garlic toast.  I was very surprised when the waiter served me a piece of toasted bread with two or three cloves of raw garlic.  Obviously my Romanian needed a little improving.  Toast and garlic is not the same as garlic toast.  And toast and garlic is far more desirable by the clientele here than garlic toast.