Oh, where are you, braised pork belly with preserved cabbage?  What about you, dry-fried tripe with hot peppers?  And you , whole steamed fish with black bean sauce?  Apparently at the Moon Star Restaurant (3600 George F. Highway,  Endwell).  Who knew?  Matthew and I happened upon a Chinese food menu in our own private Motel Hell and laughed when we saw the words REAL CHINESE FOOD.  The menu listed many authentic items on it and not just the Americanized crap, I mean selections.  Makes sense since Endwell is near Endicott, where IBM lives.  I suppose you have to have at least one decent Chinese restaurant for all those engineers.  We got into the car immediately and took Main Street all the way into Endwell and got our fix of what we eat regularly at home.  Everything was the real deal.  I could have sworn I was in Daimo when I tasted the fish, and the pork belly was every bit as good as the version I braise in my own clay pot.

Today we had the second of what I am sure will be many, many trips to Denny’s on Vestal Parkway with my dad.  He has about a million friends there,  all of whom are very concerned about his health and treat him like royalty.  We had coffee.  Lots of it.  It was hot as hell here again so the AC in Denny’s was a relief.  Always a great sign when it’s 86 F. when you get up in the morning.  Later on I went to the Lost Dog Cafe in downtown Binghamton, one of the only bistro-type cafe/restaurants in the area, to fill out housing forms for my dad in cool comfort, sipping on, in succession, a mango lassi and two iced coffees.  Matt and I then had supper at a terrible Chinese buffet on Front Street.  We knew better but went anyway for some retro action.  The food was bad, but not “Chinese food in Queens during the ’60’s” bad, which, if you lived in Queens during the ’60s, means a good kind of bad, at best, or a specific kind of bad, at worst, but was lousy in an all-encompassing way.  Goopy, cornstarchy entrees, deep fried mystery meat with fluorescent red sauce, fried shrimp that had petrified during an extended steam table stay.  The latter proved to be a limited problem, however, since most of what was in that tray consisted of empty shrimp-shaped sarcophagi anyway.  This is only a partial list of the horrors.  The saving grace was the hard ice cream (Hershey’s) that you could dip out yourself.  Thank God there was something there that these people didn’t make.  Never again.