Our system for ordering at the dim sum restaurant is a photo on my phone of the previous visit’s completed order form. This is not a perfect system. I know that.
We had been back enough times that we knew roughly what we wanted, and the kids knew what they liked, and things had settled into a comfortable routine. We filled in the form, my daughter checked it over because she is thorough, and we handed it to the server.
The server took the form to the register. She came back a couple of minutes later and said something in Dutch. My daughter speaks Dutch. My daughter is also nine, and the server was an adult delivering what was clearly not good news, so my daughter looked at the table instead of translating. After some encouragement I got my daughter to explain that the server said “too much” or something. The server pointed at the dumplings box, where I had written a clear “5.” Each dumpling order has four dumplings, and I can happily eat three orders by myself, without needing an ambulance.
The server said something else in Dutch. My daughter shrugged.
Eventually I held up three fingers. The server nodded. We had apparently ordered too many dumplings.
She was wrong about the dumplings. We did not have too many dumplings. We had exactly the right number of dumplings and then slightly fewer than we wanted because a well-meaning server had intervened. The kids ate what arrived and then asked if there were more coming. There were not.
The radish dish arrived because of my photo system.
I had checked the wrong number on the form - the system relies on me correctly reading a photo of a previous form and transferring the right codes to a new one, which sounds simple and occasionally isn’t. What arrived was a roasted radish dish I had not ordered intentionally. The radish had been prepared in a way that gave it the texture of scallops. It came with a sauce that was, for me, right at the edge of too spicy - which means it was genuinely too spicy for everyone else at the table, including my wife.
What I had not ordered, because I had checked the wrong box, was the green onion pancake. This is the dish my wife loves most at this restaurant. When it became clear what had happened - radish dish present, green onion pancake conspicuously absent - she looked at me the way you look at someone when you suspect they have done something on purpose but cannot prove it. I had not done it on purpose. I ordered the green onion pancake immediately as a correction. She accepted this, but the radish dish sat between us for the rest of the meal as a reminder.
I thought it was delicious. I ate most of it alone while my family watched.
Neither child tried it. I did not push. We had a limited number of dumplings and I was not going to spend political capital on radish.
My wife ordered veggie stir fry noodles. Not for the kids - just for herself, something different, something she wanted to try. They arrived and she ate them with the focused enthusiasm of someone who had found exactly what she was looking for.
Good, now there were two dishes at this restaurant that I could accidentally order wrong.
My daughter watched this. She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she asked if she could try some.
She liked them. She ate more than a polite taste. She did not make a face.
I did not comment on this. My wife did not comment on this. We have learned, over the course of this entire project, that commenting on it is exactly the wrong thing to do. You notice, you say nothing, you file it away.
Later in the meal, both kids announced they wanted more dumplings. After some insistence - the kind that makes clear this was not a casual preference - we ordered two more rounds. By the time they arrived my daughter had eaten her way through most of the stir fry noodles and was, by her own assessment, full. She ate one dumpling and declared herself done.
My son ate his share. The remaining dumplings needed somewhere to go.
I helped with that. The server had been concerned we had ordered too many. I want it noted that not a single dumpling went to waste, and that I did this entirely for logistical reasons and not because I had wanted five orders from the start.
It was an expensive meal. Two adults, two children, a radish dish nobody asked for, a green onion pancake ordered twice, more dumplings than the server thought reasonable and slightly fewer than we actually wanted. Both kids full, eating food that wasn’t plain anything, in a restaurant we now go to regularly enough that my daughter has opinions about the ordering form.
The server, for what it’s worth, seemed surprised by how much the kids ate.
We did not say anything about that either.