2003-06-24 11:10 p.m.

Outside Zazang restaurant in Cupertino, CA. This completely ass–kicking sign on their window was what drew my attention to Zazang in the first place.

Sometimes you're hungry for pizza. And other times you're hungry for noodles. But, Zazang in Cupertino is the only place to go when you have an insatiable craving for both pizza and noodles—at the same time!

I must be a real strange one, since the truth is that I have actually never craved both pizza and noodles simultaneously. But, I guess a lot of other people do, because almost every seat at Zazang was full of what I assumed were ravenous pizza–noodle–ivores.

Skot and I looked around at the strange foods in front of the other patrons as we waited to be seated. Most of them were eating large, wide bowls of noodles with an almost black gravy—za zang myun.

The tables were all covered with cheap red tablecloths—the kind you use on picnic tables at the park. The waitress brought us water in larger versions of the cups they used to give us in the junior high school cafeteria in the 1980s. Zazang isn't the most classy place in town. But, I'm not all that classy either, so why complain?

We were faced with some tough decisions: Noodles? Pizza? Noodles and pizza? The house specialty kim chee pizza?

In the end we decided to go for healthy. We ordered a plate of deep fried pork dumplings and one of the house specials, a mountain of deep fried chicken pieces served with spicy vegetable sauce. I asked for a Diet Coke—I mean, duh, I've gotta watch out for my girlish figure!

The food came, and It looked incredible—a medley of light and dark browns. Ray always says that brown is the color of flavor, and by the looks of things we were in for a treat. Each crispy dumpling and each nugget of chicken looked like it was shouting, "Ahoy! This food is saturated with savory, brown goodness! Many innocent passersby may be wounded in the imminent taste explosion!"

Skot and I found ourselves very confused, though, by the disparity between how it looked and how it tasted. In spite of the tasty brown appearance, the food was only just good, or perhaps slightly above good—but not by much.

Here we see Skot vs. Deep Fried. Note the exceptionally high good–looks factor of the brown nuggets and red sauce. To give you an idea of how much we ate, understand that the mound of deep fried nuggets was approximately four times larger when they brought it to us.

But, clearly that didn't stop us from eating until we felt nauseated and stupid. After the feeding, I begged Skot to push an angle–cut piece of 2" pipe into my abdomen to drain the truckload of deep fried that I had jammed into my stupid face.

We paid the bill and waddled to the restrooms. There was something I wanted to get a picture of: the peephole. Last time I was here I heard some teenage girls in the restroom shrieking about how there was a peephole. I wanted to lay eyes on this peephole and take a few pics of it before it got too famous to approach anymore.

Restaurant staff covered the "peephole" with a sticker. As you can see, someone had penetrated and ruptured the sticker–hymen, revealing the soft, fleshy peephole lurking behind.

All in all, Zazang was a great experience. Sure, the food wasn't all that great, but it looked incredible. Where else can you take a picture of yourself in front of a sign that says NOODLE PIZZA? Plus, they have an honest to God peephole. That is what I call a fine restaurant experience!


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