My sister used to live in Marietta, GA. I was reading a great food blog about Atlanta, the Blissful Glutton, which reviewed Tasty China, a restaurant in Marietta that served Sichuan style food. They specialized in cooking with Sichuan pepper, which provides a numbing experience/taste.
The food at Tasty China was delectable. We enjoyed several items, including hot and numbing beef rolls, fish cilantro rolls (no pepper here), dry fried eggplant (kind of like eggplant potato chips, but numbing), and more. The Sichuan pepper numbed our tongues so that regular tap water tasted kind of like Sprite (carbonated and kind of sweet). After our first visit, we tried to stop there or get takeout each time we visited my sister. Well, eventually the Tasty China founder (Peter Chang) left, and when we visited after that, the food was still good in our book. I think he was gone by fall 2007, and our take out was still a highlight of our 2007 Thanksgiving.
Well, my sister and her family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and I went to visit in early December. On my sister’s fridge when I arrived was a review of Hong Kong House in Knoxville, about 30 minutes away. Turns out that Peter Chang, the chef from Tasty China, had taken over an existing restaurant, Hong Kong House, in Knoxville and he was cooking up the same yummy menu we had loved in Marietta.
Glad my sister and her family followed Peter Chang to the Knoxville area.
I’ve been astonished by a few things in the show – how much alone office thinking time the creative team at Sterling Cooper has. I don’t disagree that quiet time is critical for creative work, but I can’t believe the amount of open time these folks seem to have in their schedules. Perhaps it is just for affect in the show…or maybe there really was room in the world for that many martini lunches and that much staring out the window. I don’t know, but my days are much more harried than theirs seem to be. Maybe I’m doing something wrong.
