Beansprout in Malden Center -- a restaurant review.

Well, there's this Chinese restaurant called Beansprout, which we heard was pretty good.

And, in fact, it is.

It's just that, in a city that has a huge Vietnamese population, and a healthy Cantonese community, "pretty good" Asian food just doesn't cut it. We've got options.

We'd heard that Beansprout had started up a $6.95 all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, so we decided to try it out.

There were maybe ten dishes all told, including a hot-and-sour soup, and a plate of some (mainly vegetarian) sushi rolls.

Everything was. . . fine. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing particularly inspiring, but not bad.

It's just. . . four blocks away, there's Peking Gourmet, which also has a $6.95 all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, which has more than ten desserts. Two soups, four kinds of dim sum, six fish dishes. . .

I realized, walking into Beansprout, that there were no non-Caucasian customers in the place. In a city that's got huge Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Cape Verdian populations, that's actually pretty uncommon in general, and not an encouraging sign in a Chinese restaurant. I mean, I'm pretty used to being one of only a handful of Caucasians in Malden restaurants. Hugh O'Neil's, the Irish pub, tends to have more Asians in it than this place did.

So, it wasn't bad. But simply "not being bad" isn't a strong enough incentive to attract us back, not when we have so many other options.

One thought I had, inspired by the sorts of reality shows we watch

The only reality TV I've ever watched has been the PBS stuff -- 1900 House, Manor House, Frontier House, 1940 House, and Colonial House. Okay, also Rough Science.

Something that occurred to me is that in all of those shows (except Rough Science, which is doing something different) every single person on it lost weight. Even the lord and lady of the manor in Manor House. And were therefore healthier at the end of the shows than the beginning.

Boy. We Westerners have a truly impressive degree of gluttony. Even the upper-class rich parasite classes ate less, and exercised more, than we do.

You know what the scariest thing in the world is?

I said this just after walking into Mystery House for Shabbat dinner tonight, and got a whole bunch of good answers, including, "President Bush", "President Schwarzenager", and "Uma Thurman's feet", but what's ACTUALLY the scariest thing in the world is Lis, angry, seriously considering revenge.

Really, really scary. Remind me never to majorly piss her off.