THE GREAT FOOD POISONING WAITING GAME

At lunch today a co-worker wanted to go get some gyros but myself and another person weren’t so hot on the idea. So we let the gyro lover choose another place. He chose New Peace restaurant on 630 Davie Street. Now we’ve gone there several times before and each time left me with a good impression. The food previously was very tasty so there was no reason for me to not go again.

So off we went to said restaurant. We ordered the usual fare which consisted of Shanghai fried noodle, Shanghai steamed dumplings (pictured above), pan-fried dumplings, beef wrap, and some gai lan. The Shanghai fried noodle came out first and it was awesome. The wok hei imparted on this dish was truly spectacular. It all went downhill after this. I should have known something was wrong when the beef wrap came out kinda cold. I’ve never had beef wrap so cold before. The pancake portion was almost room temperature and the beef, while cooked, seemed almost colder.

The kicker came when the Shanghai dumplings arrived. Now usually, because these dumplings are steamed, they arrive radioactively hot. The inside juices of the dumpling are basically near boiling temperature normally so everyone is very cautious of just biting into one. I took one and gingerly bit into it. It was not hot at all, in fact, it seemed kinda cold. I thought this was weird. Dumplings like this shouldn’t be so cold. Perhaps they’d left it out? If so, why wouldn’t they have just brought them to us? I ate the rest of my dumpling but the texture was all wrong. The meat inside felt too mushy.

My co-workers thought there was something wrong too. Stupidly, we all tried another dumpling just to see it was just our imaginations. Nope! Same thing. There was a left over dumpling, so one of my co-workers took it apart with his chopsticks. We discovered the pork meat inside the dumpling was all soft and mushy, it had not been cooked all the way. Oh no. We complained of course and they took the item off our bill. That was the least of our problems though. We had all consumed potentially undercooked pork. If this was beef, I wouldn’t have even blinked but this was pork, dangerous deadly pork.

So the waiting game started. I knew that I’d have to wait at least eight hours or so before I could feel some relief they maybe I wouldn’t have caught something. We all went back to work and went about our business. I checked up on everyone every hour until around 3pm. To my somewhat surprise, everyone was ok. I didn’t feel nauseous or weird at all during the afternoon. I even had two cups of coffee and didn’t feel the need to poop!

I feel like we definitely dodged a bullet today and I’m super disappointed that New Peace restaurant on 630 Davie Street served us undercooked pork. What? You wanted to know what restaurant served us undercooked pork? Well, that was New Peace restaurant on 630 Davie Street. While we’re fine now, should I be concerned about cysticercosis?