On Saturday, hillway rode over to CP Center on the same bicycle he usually uses for grocery runs, with me and Little Bear on board. The trip was my idea. I had seen a post on WeChat saying the food court on the fourth floor was opening, and the promise of everything being half price was tempting enough to get me curious.
Little Honeydew didn’t come with us. She never really takes to restaurant food and is much happier eating at home. Little Bear, on the other hand, was thrilled the moment she heard we were going out. She hurried off to find her little leather shoes, hugged the scarf she thought she would need for the ride, and kept urging us to hurry up and change our shoes.
I had expected the first day of a grand opening, especially with a 50% discount, to be packed. But when we got to the fourth floor, there were hardly any customers. Many of the vendors were still cleaning and arranging their spaces, and the whole place smelled of fresh paint and recent renovation. A lot of stalls weren’t open yet at all. We heard everything would only be fully operating by evening. hillway had come ready to eat a proper meal with Little Bear in his arms, so the scene was disappointing.
Since it was still well before lunch, we wandered around the mall instead. We took photos of Little Bear in front of a cartoon bee statue, then exchanged points from our supermarket membership card for vouchers and used them to buy mantis shrimp and hotpot fish balls.
Lately hillway had been telling me that although we still needed to save up for a car, our finances were better than they had been two years ago, so I shouldn’t be so reluctant to spend money. If we wanted to eat something or buy something, we could just go ahead and do it. Since we were already out, we decided not to head home to cook and went to the Pizza Hut on the first floor instead.
That turned out to be more crowded than the new food court. There were no empty tables inside, and a line had already formed at the entrance, so we joined it and studied the menu while waiting. We ordered a small Hawaiian pizza for 30 yuan, a Greek-style seafood risotto for 36 yuan, cheesy bacon mashed potatoes for 18 yuan, and vanilla ice cream finger puffs for 20 yuan.
Little Bear was clearly hungry by then. The moment the seafood rice was placed on the table, she grabbed a spoon and started eating right away. She polished off the four shrimp and a few slices of mushroom, but refused to touch the rice itself. The squid tentacles were a bit tough, so I finished those. Besides the shrimp, mushrooms, and squid, the dish also had green peppers and onion, and the sauce mixed into the rice was actually quite tasty. Still, seafood in Shantou isn’t particularly expensive, and for the price you can usually buy several kinds fresh, so the ingredients in this rice dish felt fairly ordinary.
I remembered that last time at another restaurant we had ordered mashed potatoes and Little Bear wouldn’t eat them. I thought maybe her taste had changed by now, but no such luck. She still had no interest in that soft, mushy texture and only poked at it with a spoon. The bacon gave it a sweet-and-salty flavor.
A couple of days earlier, hillway had tried a mango-flavored pizza at a restaurant with his coworkers and said it was surprisingly soft and delicious, so this time he picked another sweeter option. The small pizza came cut into four slices, and compared with the large one we had ordered before, the portion looked tiny. Pizza really does seem more worthwhile when you order the bigger size. Little Bear made me remove the bacon and pineapple topping from her slice, ate one whole piece, and then lost interest. After that she leaned over the back of her chair and watched the children at the next table. The Hawaiian pizza was good, but it was definitely the kind of thing that needs to be eaten hot.
The dessert took a long time to arrive. There was supposed to be a buy-one-get-one offer for members through WeChat, but the signal inside the restaurant was so bad that we couldn’t get the coupon page to load. We had to give up on it, after all that fiddling. It only left hillway more irritated and didn’t exactly make the meal feel satisfying. In that weather, the ice cream was actually a little too cold. I handed one of the finger puffs to Little Bear; they looked a lot like Chinese fried dough sticks. She didn’t care for the cream filling and gave up after two or three bites, so I finished it. Lately I’ve found that rich, milky desserts can be oddly comforting—just a few bites are enough to make a bad mood ease up.
After lunch, none of us were exactly hungry, but somehow we still didn’t feel full, or maybe not fully satisfied. Little Bear asked us to take her on the escalator so she could go see the bee and the elephant again, so back into the mall we went, wandering slowly until we reached the fourth floor once more. By then, about half the vendors had opened, and there were at least some customers sitting down to eat.
We hesitated for a while over whether to eat again, but in the end hillway decided to get one of the cards needed to pay there. The staff strongly recommended a rechargeable card with bonus credit, but since there didn’t seem to be any shops that would really draw us back regularly—and the half-price promotion certainly wouldn’t last—we chose a simple instant-use card instead. It required a 10-yuan deposit and came loaded with 20 yuan.
The first thing we ordered was a bowl of guozhi, which I had never tried before. When I had first arrived in Shantou, I had even mistaken the name for “fruit juice.” One bowl cost 15 yuan and let you choose four toppings, such as braised pork, braised egg, pork intestine, and tripe. At half price, it came to 7.5 yuan. Compared with the innocent sound of the name, the actual bowl was much richer and greasier than I had expected. The pork intestine was hard to chew through, and both the braised egg and the braised meat were quite salty. We fed Little Bear some of the plain noodle sheets that had less flavor. As a breakfast food, which is when many people eat it, it would be far too heavy for me.
The fried chicken stall had the biggest crowd gathered in front of it, so we went back to the service desk, added another 10 yuan to the card, and bought an order of spicy chicken wings—four pieces. The original price was 28 yuan, so the half-price cost was 14 yuan. On the plate, the serving looked much larger than what you’d get at KFC, but the taste wasn’t even close. The outer coating fell off as soon as you bit into it. Apart from the heat of the chili sauce on the outside, there wasn’t much flavor at all, and the whole thing felt oily in an unpleasant way, as if the frying oil itself wasn’t very good.
That was when it really struck me that whether you’re shopping or eating out, the safer choice is often still a recognizable chain. The quality is more predictable, prices are steadier, and the odds of regretting what you bought are much lower.
After the greasy guozhi and the oily fried chicken, all I wanted was something to drink to cut through the heaviness. This year Gong Cha shops had been popping up all over Shantou, one after another, so I squeezed into the crowd of schoolgirls waiting for milk tea. Then the staff discovered the machine was broken, and the whole group scattered almost immediately.
By the time this long meal-and-snacking session finally ended, it was already past three in the afternoon. Little Bear was sleepy, and so were we. The staff kept trying to talk us out of it, but we were convinced there was almost no chance we would come back and spend money at that food court again, so we insisted on returning the card. We got 18.5 yuan back in cash and went home.