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| - So, Dragon I looks nice, with dark wood floors and (oddly mismatched) furniture. It's doing the fusion thing, so essentially Korean/Thai/Vietnamese. I am seated by a hostess/server who does not appear to understand much of what I say to her and given a room-temperature, plastic water cup.
I open the menu and decide I want to have some oolong tea, some kimchee, and the pad Thai with shrimp--"extra, extra spicy," I say while she nods along in empathy.
The kimchee appears a few moments later. It's fine. I then note, with some trepidation, that the server is bringing a giant, steaming styrofoam cup from behind the bar. I pray silently that this is not my tea, but of course it is: around a quart of boiling water with a teabag, about which she helpfully instructs me, "Take this out in about two minutes." I let the urge pass to explain that at most restaurants, the staff makes the food and drinks for you. The combination of far too much liquid and the insulated cup means that the tea doesn't cool down enough to drink until I'm ready to go.
The pad Thai arrives. It is big, but nothing else good can be said about it. It is oddly sweet, smothered in three times the appropriate quantity of crushed peanuts, barely features any shrimp, and appears to be the inverse of the spice level that I asked.
As I grow tired of my molten tea and boring food, I await my check. But my server and another staffer are instead sitting at the bar having dinner two feet away from me, so I have to wait. The price for everything ($20) would actually have been reasonable if the food had been any good, which it really was not.
And so, dear Yelpers, I have learned that I need to check with y'all before eating anything else on State Street in this town, as looking up the rating may have saved me. Tourist districts are always like this, building business cultures where hardly anybody tries hard, because they've got your money and don't care if you come back. There will be more tourists tomorrow and more students next year.
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