8
votes
Many in Chinatown have never tried its most popular restaurant, so I brought the food to them
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- Authors
- Frank Shyong, Jenn Harris
- Published
- May 27 2019
- Word count
- 1902 words
This is so absurd to me. I love coming to Chinatown to shop in the maze of cheap knockoffs and to enjoy the shops that we don’t have near our house. I would never think about waiting in line for hours for some fried chicken, and especially not while some of the best food is readily available in small carts, shops or restaurants.
I think the author would have been better off buying from some of the other places and offering some fantastic Chinese food to people waiting in line for overpriced chicken.
It wouldn't matter, it's not really about the food. The one guy described it really candidly by saying he was there because of "peer pressure over the internet".
A good way to think of places like this is that they're the social-media equivalent of video game achievements. A game can have a difficult achievement like "beat level 5 without jumping", and a significant portion of the game's players will be willing to spend hours working on getting that achievement. It can involve a way of playing the game that they never even would have considered doing otherwise—and that isn't even enjoyable—and they'll still spend hours on it to check that box.
Places like this are just like that. There's some kind of psychological pressure about it that compels some people to do it, even if the actual "reward" is nothing more than a virtual trophy or overpriced chicken.
There's a shop a block away in a small (very small) grocery/snack store that sells $3 banh-mi sandwiches. Now that's the spot.
Chinatown is definitely being bombarded by a bunch of hip shit moving in.