(John Tlumacki/Globe Staff/File 2007)
BRING THE FAMILY
The joys of a pupu platter
(John Tlumacki/Globe Staff/File 2007)
When I was a kid, my family didn't go out to eat very often. But when we did, it was usually to a Chinese restaurant. I have this crystal-clear memory of eating at a tiny joint near our house - shared platters of chow mein, egg foo young, and fried rice; a cup of some sort of juice with a colorful umbrella sticking out of it; and a fountain in the middle of the room. Looking back, I'm sure the food was barely average, but it's a great memory.
Which is the reason my wife and I took our kids out for Chinese restaurant recently. My wife and I rarely eat Chinese these days - we've become very health-conscious as we approach 40 - and anyway we don't enjoy it nearly as much as we once did, having consumed it in bulk when we were dating. But we wanted our kids to have the experience, if only for the memory. We avoided the more popular spots such as the Kowloon and stopped at a place in Brockton, simply because it was on the way to where we were headed.
We ordered the kids a pupu platter for three. (When you're a 9-year-old boy - and we have two of those - few phrases are more amusing than "pupu platter," so it was an easy choice.) Aidan, Liam, and Amelia devoured the chicken wings, fried shrimp, beef teriyaki, and spare ribs. The egg rolls and crab rangoons didn't go over so well, but they'd had plenty to eat, so it didn't matter. The kids don't get a lot of meat in our house, so having so much of it at once must have been an all-out assault on their palates. Kelly and I kept offering them some of our vegetable fried rice and yu hsiang shrimp, but they wanted no part of it.
What they did want were the fortune cookies that arrived with the check. It was their first experience with them, and the cookies with the moderately nonsensical messages were an even bigger hit than the pupu platter. Heck, next time maybe we'll stop at the market, buy a box of fortune cookies, microwave them open, put our own silly messages inside, and close them back up. (Yes, that works. Try it sometime.)
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