Night at Ra, Pt. 1

Dear stand-up eaters,

A few weeks back, I did the Happy Hour + Rockets game with my older brother and his friends. Usually, they go to Kona at the Galleria, but this time, they decided on Ra. It's nice to try new things, but you should probably avoid popular places on a Friday night.

Ra Sushi was packed like the Superdome after Katrina. It probably violated the maximum occupancy limit, but as it was an Asian place, the establishment ignores safety in quest for deeper profits.

After I scaled the stairs to get to the main dining floor, I found a mass of humanity trying to get a bite of Ra fish. There was a superfluous amount of attractive women who were attempting to upgrade to better boyfriends (by flaunting their assets), but were currently accompanied by the douche-bag starter model, the kind that emulate the Jersey Jagger Bomb faux-celebs.

I’m still refining my pick-up line. So far, I have ‘Hi, my name is g. I’m a doctor, and I make six figures. Do you want to get on this?’ (patent pending). It’s a work in progress. It currently has a zero success rate, but like the search for weapons of mass destruction, I swear that line will hit paydirt one day.

Being Asian, I don’t have the trouble of differentiating between groups of the yellow-skinned folk, and I spot my brother and his friends fairly quickly, as they were standing a little past the hostess’s station. Okay, so I guess instead of being like the rest of the suckers standing in the lobby, we’re going to have some Kirin beer while we wait at this area where there is an overhang that acted like a makeshift table.

I didn’t care as long as there’s a place to rest my drink. The server comes by with massive bottles of Kirin and delicate porcelain curved flutes of warm sake. Like good alcoholics, we pound some sake bombs and toast the Rockets good fortune against the Heat. Then another dude comes by with some plates of sushi. At this point, I became mildly confused, because as far as I know, sushi isn’t served dim sum-style where they wheel around carts, asking you what you want.

The confusion cleared up when one of the guys said that it was our order. There weren’t even chopsticks or napkins at the little overhang area, not to mention the lack of any kind of chairs or chair-like objects. Though we do look a little F-O-B, we’re decent enough to use utensils. Some of the guys shrugged, and grabbed the food-art with their thumbs and index fingers. I shrug too, and grabbed a pork dumpling.

The silverware and woodware and napkins came by later, but as we were well on our way to being so far gone, we ignored them for the most part. The alcohol coursed through bodies which weren’t well equipped to handle such poison (aldehyde dehydrogenase mutation which leads to poor metabolism and subsequent ‘Asian Flush’), and the already uninhibited became even more dis-inhibited.

One of the guys said to a group of fun black girls, ‘You know I like that dark meat, right? I’ll get you a bucket of fried chicken, but only on a Tuesday. 99-cent special at Popeyes. Nah mean*?’

As it turns out, you can say a lot of things if you can say it confidently and playfully. Rather than getting slapped, the guy got a bunch of laughs (along with him, not at him). One of the memorable things one of those girls said was, ‘Nuh uh, you couldn’t handle all this woman.’ Very true. I doubted if anyone could handle all of her.

After a couple more sake bombs, I began feeling like I was in Vietnam, even though I’ve never been there.

me: ‘Damn. We eatin’ like we in Vietnam, all standin’ and squatin’ and sh*t.’

guy: ‘How you know what we ate like when we in Vietnam?’

me: ‘I saw some pictures on some travel ads. Looked like people be eatin’ and tryin’ to take a dump at the same time.’
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After several more rounds of rice wine, we left of our own free will and on our own sets of legs; I was a bit surprised we hadn’t been kicked out. And we got to the game perfectly fine**, though I soon passed out on the seat as the Heat proceeded to pound on the Rockets.

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*you know what I mean?
**there was a DD, natch