When To Feed Your Child Instant Noodles.
Picture this.
It’s Sunday, and you’re a deadbeat dad without a cushiony Monday to Friday job, which means you have to meet clients during weekend mornings and rely on mum to drive your daughter to her Japanese cultural school or Mandarin or Taekwando or Kumon or abacus or finger painting lessons.
We’ll have lunch together, think about what you want, you promise to her puppy eyes.
Picture time goes by and you did your darndest to be likable which is really difficult after two years of lockdown and it’s suddenly half-past twelve and mum has returned from picking up your daughter from her guitar or Karate or gender equality or harmony week or sea scout sessions.
Did you have fun? Have you decided what to have for lunch? You ask.
Nothing.
Nothing? Not even fish & chips?
Fine, fish & chips then. She tries to sound not excited.
Mum then vetos that decision, because we can’t think of a decent place since our local favourite closed down.
Let’s just go to Hinoki to takeaway some sushi.
At least there’s fish.
So picture driving to Fitzroy, and because it’s a Sunday, it took you longer than usual to find parking in the narrowest alleyway.
Just as you were approaching Hinoki, you saw Alimentari.
It’s been a while since you dined in Alimentari, possibly three years ago. Great memories, you remember the daughter dipping her flatbread into the shakshuka.
And surely, surely they’ll have some sort of kids meal equivalent of fish and chips.
You walk in, to be told the house was full.
Do you want to be on the waitlist, asks the girl with the dark eye circles.
What does that mean? Do you call us when a table is available?
No, you just wait here until it’s available.
Or not, up to you. Her shrug says sorry, not sorry.
You want that perfect Sunday lunch, so you stay and wait as other couples, the other parties of twos get seated before you. Your daughter is getting restless so you walk her down to Falco to grab a baguette while mum holds the queue.
It’s been a while since you queue up for anything, but you want that perfect Sunday lunch with butterflies in the courtyard.
It’s always at the cusp of giving up, as you’re going to call it quits, that they tell you a table will be ready in two minutes, which is a lie, because it’s always five minutes, ten, fifteen minutes.
You sit down right next to the bar, and you’re hungry, flabbergasted, annoyed, and you’re projecting meatball wraps, and chips and hash browns, something you can dip with your fingers and go om nom nom nom with sauce all around your lips.
You rip open the menu like a Hulk Hogan and his T-shirt.
So picture none of those items on the menu. Those were breakfast dishes. It’s lunchtime now, so it’s all salmon gravlax, and olives and calamari. Sophisticated green peas, garden salad, gnocchi and spaghetti aglio e olio at $25 per dish.
No wraps. The place, famous for meatball and chicken schnitzel wraps, has no wraps on the menu.
No fries.
And then this other lady comes and informs you that they’ve run out of this, this, that, and that.
Your daughter looks at you, the puppy eyes are asking, where the fuck is my fish and chips?
You look at your wife, and both of you did a mental calculation of the cost of money and time versus the return of a five-year-old behaving in a restaurant made for a demographic ten times her age.
Despite wasting thirty minutes, you decided to leave and return to the original plan.
The perfect Sunday lunch has sailed, but takeaway sushi lunch is still salvageable.
You do the mountain breathing exercise.
You enter Hinoki and the smell of cooked rice, roasted seaweed, rice vinegar calm your by-now-it’s-almost-two-let’s-get-this-over-with senses.
The usual torched salmon belly don and some sort of maki sushi California roll combination for the kid? You turn to your wife.
Ahem.
The lady, standing behind the counter, points to a sign.
A sign that says: The current wait time for in-store ordering is one hour.
Her shrugs says sumimasen, but not sumimasen.
You hear your soul leaving your body.
Your daughter has disappeared to the candy aisle.
Your spirit animal approaches you from the back and whispers,
now.
Now is the time to go home and feed your child instant noodles.
Throw your free-range, first-world, white lady, holier-than-thou, health-conscious, fart-sniffing conscious way, and go home and feed your child something easy, nasty, speedy.
Something made for *hand gestures* this.
If it’s so bad for you, why is it selling so well all over the world?
You chuck a dry noodle version of instant noodles, a tonkotsu soup version of instant noodles, Donbei udon, into the basket.
You tell your daughter to choose any chips she wants from the shelf. No fish, but go crazy on the chips.
And of course, she picks the prawn crackers, which have no potatoes in them.
You rip open the crackers in the car, like Hulk Hogan and his T-shirt.
As she gobbles two, three, four in a row, mum says you can really taste the sweetness of the prawn.
It’s the biggest lie of the year - even your daughter knows no real prawns were involved in making the seasoning of the crackers.
But you both nod along.
Yes, see, because on the package it says ‘sweet prawn’.
Yes, yes.
This is good, isn’t it?
Yes, daddy, and at least we still have the baguette.
Yes, yes, yes.