Restaurant Review: Happy Valley Oriental Restaurant

Yesterday was Cameron's and my one year anniversary. We hadn't made any big plans since we already hosted a celebration party last week, so for our actual anniversary day we left it low key. Cameron served me breakfast and coffee in bed, then we went for a leisurely bike ride along the Flint River Trail. It was a beautiful breezy, sunny day.

On a whim we headed up to the Birch Run Outlets so Cameron could look for a new pair of jeans. After perusing around for a while we decided it was time for dinner.

We were feeling a little burnt out on all the regular places we usually go, and we weren't feeling up for driving extra to somewhere further away (and there certainly wasn't anywhere to eat in Birch Run unless we wanted fast food).

So we got back on the freeway in the direction of home, trying to make a dinner decision along the way. When we neared the Flint area, Cameron exited at Corunna Rd., hoping a bright idea would appear just in the nick of time.

An idea appeared, alright. But it wasn't a bright one.

As soon as we stopped at the light at the end of the exit ramp, we found ourselves facing Happy Valley. It's a little "hole in the wall" place that we have always been curious about but were never brave enough to try. We'd never heard of anyone eating there so we had no idea what it was like, other than what we could assume by the intriguing offering of Cantonese, Thai and Szechuan style cuisine.

A flicker of adventurousness and the grumbling in our stomachs led us to bravely go where no Flint Foodie had gone before. As we pulled in, Cameron said, "Maybe this place will be awesome, like a hidden treasure!" I had as much hope as he did, although for a moment I thought that if it were that great, we would have heard about it already. But still, I was willing to be the guinea pig either way. It would be a great story, I thought, to remember that on our one year anniversary we discovered an awesome Thai restaurant.

Rule #1:
When you walk into a restaurant and it smells weird, TURN AROUND AND WALK BACK OUT.
No joke. When we walked in, I immediately noticed a strange odor. I couldn't pin it down but it vaguely reminded me of a gas station bathroom. You know what I'm talking about. I didn't smell yummy peanut curry sauce, I smelled bathroom.

The ambience was plain, but fine. Several tables were neatly set up in a small room, with a giant flat screen TV in the center of it all. The place was completely devoid of customers other than us, and there was no one around to seat us. We took it upon ourselves to find a table (which wasn't hard because they were all available) and finally an elderly gentleman brought us menus. He did not greet us or seem particularly enthused that we were there to give him business.

The menu was predictable and unimpressive. Nothing on it made us go, "oooh!" There was a small vegetarian section with the usual dishes. I'm a big rice noodle fan and prefer it over steamed rice, but none of the vegetarian dishes were offered with any kind of noodles, just rice. I settled on a Thai curry vegetable dish and Cameron decided to get some sort of noodles with vegetables and shrimp (he eats seafood now).

We were then greeted by an elderly lady. We assumed that she and the gentleman were the owners of the restaurant. Anyway, when I ordered my meal, I inquired if it would be possible to substitute rice noodles for the steamed rice. She peered at me over the rims of her glasses and shook her head like I was a silly child and said, "No, those are two separate items."

Alright then.



Rule #2:
If your intuition is telling you to leave...LEAVE.
While we were waiting for our food, Cameron started getting a weird feeling like this was a bad idea, that something wasn't right. We should have paid heed to this intuition, but we didn't. We stayed the path.

You know what they say about hindsight, and as soon as our food arrived, I was saying it to myself.

Looking at this picture, the food doesn't appear that bad. But if you saw it (and smelled it) like we did, you would understand.

Let's start with Cameron's meal: As soon as she set the plates down, I caught a strong scent of bad fish. Cameron did not order fish, he ordered shrimp. Shrimp is not supposed to smell like fish.

Everything on his plate looked gray. The shrimp was gray, the noodles were gray, even the vegetables were pale and pathetic looking. Even with our noses pinched this meal would not appear appetizing.

The taste was bland and overly spicy at the same time. Nothing on the plate had any flavor except for the blast of red pepper flakes mixed throughout. Cameron had prudently ordered "medium spicy," even though he usually likes it pretty hot. But when we're at a new place and we don't know how they measure their spicy factor, it's a good idea to place it safe. But this was unbearable even for him. He took three bites and waved his white napkin in surrender to the fire infiltrating his palate.

My dish didn't have any redeeming factors either. The vegetables looked and tasted like they were dumped, frozen and pre-chopped, out of a giant industrial sized bag and thrown into a pan to defrost. The sauce was watery and bland and completely incapable of adding any flavor to the vegetables. I didn't even taste any curry. Even the steamed rice looked strange and had an unusual, chewy texture. How do you screw up rice at an Asian restaurant? Oh and my dish was also almost unpalatably spicy.

We found ourselves in a situation we'd never been in before. We were both convinced that if we had taken any more bites of these dishes, we would be seriously ill. Were we really contemplating sending our food back? Was it really that awful?

Yes.

The lady came back a few minutes later to check on us and asked how everything was. Cameron eased into it by first addressing that his dish was too spicy for him to possibly eat.

If you want to get an idea of what this lady transformed into at this point, picture what your mom looked like after you did something very naughty as a kid, put her in the body of an older Asian woman, then give her three heads and giant, poisionous fangs. Breathing fire. And shooting laser beams from her eyes.

This whole Happy Valley facade was clearly a scam because now, suddenly, we were feeling more in the midst of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The three headed dragon lady had lured us into her lair with her false offerings of delicious Szechuan cuisine and instead, I was convinced, had planned on having us for dinner.

Rule #3:
Never criticize The Creature From Happy Valley's culinary creations (or disasters, more appropriately).
But criticize we did. The lady first chuckled uncomfortably and asked, "why did you order medium?" Cameron shrugged and explained that we go to a lot of Thai places and medium is usually plenty tolerable for him. She offered, after a little protest about how each restaurant cooks differently, to rinse the pepper flakes out with water. Uhh...gross?

I think at that point, if the food was actually good, it would have been fair for us to admit fault and just remember to order mild next time. But it was time to break the news that it wasn't just the spiciness we weren't fans of.

Cameron admitted that he didn't like anything about the dish, that it was tasteless and didn't look or smell fresh. He kindly but honestly said that he didn't care to try something else, nor did he want to pay for the meal. The lady was so upset that she kept leaving and coming back in the middle of his sentences. She started ranting about how she wasn't going to pay for our meal because we ordered medium spicy when we should have ordered mild (completely ignoring the fact that we just told her it wasn't just the spice- the food sucked!). Cameron said that that was fine, but he would be sure to tell all our friends not to patron her restaurant. "That's fine, tell everyone on the street!" she replied. I was trying to do the math in my head and determine if she would lose more money by taking our plates back or by losing potential future customers.

Then she looked at me and demanded, "what about you?" At this point I feared her wrath so much that I almost valued my life more than standing up for what was right but I still sheepishly admitted (of course not looking at her in the face for fear of being laser-beamed), "I could eat it...but I would rather not." She stormed away and came back with a compromise: the bill for one dish instead of two.

In hindsight we probably should have just booked it without agreeing to pay for spoiled food that we had barely touched, but we wanted to keep our heads in tact (I could picture her coming after us in a terrifying, Happy Valley monster truck) so Cameron slapped a bill down on the table and we got out of there in one piece.


Cameron was determined to not let this unhappy experience thwart our anniversary, so we went to a trusted standby, Salvatore Scallopini, and were spoiled with good food and service by our friend Cheryl.


Rule #4:
Do not enter a suspicious looking restaurant unless you have been expressly advised to by a guinea pig (not you).

Three-headed dragon lady was so kind as to still leave us a fortune cookie. Cameron ate it with spite, notwithstanding our suspicions of it being laced with poison.

We won't go so far as to tactlessly coin the restaurant Unhappy Valley, or Crappy Valley. We just want a piece of our souls back that we feel were taken away in that treacherous den.

Dear Three-Headed Dragon Lady: