It starts with a recommendation. It always does. You can’t really figure out what to think of a restaurant unless someone gives you the advance word on it. Well, you can, actually. You can stab blind into the dark and try a place on a whim without anyone telling you anything. You see a menu that has some interesting things, and right away, the appeal draws you in, at least theoretically. There are some adventurous folks out there who will only try to eat at establishments that they feel they have discovered. Not everyone is that adventurous, and even if they are, they don’t make those leaps all the time.
Everyone likes a good recommendation every now and again. Human beings like having information on things before they dive in anyway, generally speaking. The more personal the relationship, the better the recommendation generally is received, at least anecdotally. I’m not going to try to connect the dots on how little people are listening to recommendations on getting certain vaccines for particular diseases that are ravaging the world going on two years running, mainly because it’s too depressing to get fully into. But generally, people are more receptive to advice when it comes from friends or family regarding what they’re eating. Sometimes, that advice doesn’t even have to come from a friend or family, to be honest.
A few months ago, my wife and I joined a Facebook group called “Delco Restaurant Review,” as we are both people who enjoy eating and want to know as many places that we can get good food as possible. This Facebook group is somewhat infamous because people will just post the most deranged and inane complaints about chain restaurants possible. I’m not saying those are necessarily bad reviews, to be quite clear. I’ve gotten plenty of laughs at the people using the group as a sounding board to talk about how bad the big box restaurants can be, no matter how valid their complaints. For example, one such post the other day saw a father complaining that he only got one free breakfast sandwich instead of one free breakfast sandwich per person in his car at the local Wendy’s drive-through. Or the woman who prefaced her post by saying “Please don’t be mean to me” and proceeded to type out the most idiotic and incendiary comments known to man to entice people to be extremely mean to her. Those posts are good for a guffaw or two, and they’re a secondary reason to sub up to the page. I’m sure other review groups on Facebook are similar in stature.
The real reason we both subbed up to the group, though, was to find new and exciting places to eat near our home. Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives is a great resource, but Guy Fieri can only go to so many hidden gems in a given time. Facebook is bad for a number of reasons, but things like recommending local places to people who otherwise wouldn’t know about them or think to try them fall under the platonic function of this site that otherwise would just exist to pump disinformation into the heads of people vulnerable to it like cold air from a HVAC compressor into the blower. We’ve used the group to find some jewels in the rough, like the Walk-In Deli, a self-explanatory store that settled into a closed Wawa like a hermit crab nestling into a new shell. They have made-to-order hoagies that are always packed and crafted with care. There’s Yosemite Burrito, which only appears like one of those big box fast casual Mexican places in skeletal structure only. The Cedar Craft and Kitchen is a little spot tucked inside a small industrial park across the street from a residential block that you would absolutely have never found out about without word of mouth. The Clam Tavern is an old-school seafood joint that has stood at the same corner for a half-a-century. And then there’s Noodle Eighty-Eight.
One of the first places we became aware of after joining this group was this Asian spot that opened up in the spot where an Outback Steakhouse once stood. That particular Outback was one of the busiest locations in the nation, and they outgrew the little strip mall storefront to move down to a larger, more spacious building at the end of the cap. Noodle Eighty-Eight was not the first new restaurant to occupy space along that particular strip mall, which has a notorious reputation for turnover. There have been plenty of restaurants there, most recently a Mexican joint called Fiesta Maya, which set up shop, served good food, and then evaporated like water on a summer day. Does this particular strip mall have high overhead? Does the Outback Steakhouse overshadow everyone else to the point where they are only getting a trickle of business? I guess the saving grace is that if you are good enough for long enough, you can stay there. Heng’s Thai, a place I’ve never visited personally, has been in that particular strip mall ever since I started dating my then-girlfriend, now-wife.
We soon found out though that Noodle Eighty-Eight was a place whose quality should at least give them a fighting chance to stay where they are for a good long time. We tried them for the first time after spending an afternoon at a local carnival. You can eat at a carnival, but the options are rarely ever as appetizing as they seem when you read them as letters on the big menu. The options are always fried, and rarely are they ever fried well. The only thing you can get from a carnival that will taste great even if it’s soaked in grease is funnel cake anyway, and you don’t eat that every day for good reason. This was around the time when we first started out in this group, and so we went for an early dinner.
Chinese food is always a fallback option in our home, but Noodle Eighty-Eight, whose original location in Souderton drew rave reviews from locals there, is not the kind of Asian food you find in the little takeout shack with the paper box containers and big menu boards. The food skews more authentic to what is served in China, as well as Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. It’s also a place where you sit down and have table service. It’s not better or worse than your favorite takeout joint, just different. Sometimes, different can be refreshing.
The first time we went, I ordered the hot ‘n sour soup and chili noodles. My wife got dan-dan noodles. My daughter got sweet and sour chicken, and my son got rice noodles with shrimp. We got soup dumplings as appetizers. The meal was fantastic, but that’s a given for any restaurant that becomes a regular spot. Do you go back to a place where the food is mediocre, let alone bad? Each of the four times my family has gone back there, the food has been excellent. We’ve even discovered that we like things that have been staples in America for years like scallion pancakes while there.
There are other reasons why we are so drawn to this place that we have visited four times in the last two months, why we brought my parents there as a place where we could eat a good meal with them. There’s the kindly old waiter who always makes time to try and get a laugh out of the kids at the table and whom you do not have to ask to refill your water. You might laugh at the idea until you’re halfway through your dinner and are looking for something to wash out your throat with no one with a water pitcher in sight. They have glasses shaped like tiki idols for the kids too. Upon our first visit, the manager gave us coupons for $10 off our next visit, and each time we used it, they replenished it for us. In short, every time we have been to that restaurant, they treated us like we were a little more than consumers.
That’s the trick, to be honest. It’s recognizing familiarity and treating people not wholly transactionally. Yes, there’s business sense in fostering such a relationship. You put on a brave face as a restaurateur and give everyone who comes into your establishment treatment they may not have earned at first because your goal is to be profitable enough to stay in business. People don’t just look at food or cleanliness as reasons to revisit an eatery after they’ve completed their first meal there, whether or not that’s fair. How far you go in fostering that kind of environment depends on you, and it may or may not work on everyone who walks in the door. Some people won’t connect with you, but the people who do cherish that attempt at bonding, no matter how superficial it is at first.
One might call this a parasocial relationship, but rare are the cases where you see dining patrons inviting restaurant to their weddings or birthday functions. There’s mutual benefit. A restaurant gets a loyal customer, and the patron gets a bona fide guaranteed pleasurable experience for a night out or a lunch or whatever the occasion is. Sometimes, relationships don’t need to be any deeper than that. There are few things more enjoyable than a great meal out, just as there are few things as frustrating as a terrible restaurant experience. The latter seems to proliferate greatly, especially now when a combination of COVID-19 and restaurateurs’ lack of budging on giving service staff a livable wage are leaving eateries short-staffed. That just makes the former experiences all the more worth it. And for the love of God, if you are eating out in these times (or any, to be honest), tip your servers well.
I know a lot of you don’t live in the area, and I try not to do restaurant review posts on here because of that. However, if you live in the area or are swinging through, Noodle Eighty-Eight is located 1168 Baltimore Pike, Springfield, PA. I recommend the Chinese-flavored braised beef noodle, the xiao long bao soup dumplings, and the peony shrimp.