When you open the doors of a Chinese restaurant, your ears are blasted with the roar of a thousand people, like the heat blasting on your face when opening an oven door. Accompanying the choir is a ceramic percussion playing a chaotic clang of dishes, bowls, tea cups, teapots and spoons. Once the door closes behind you though, the cacophony just becomes part of the room you're in and fades into the background -- you notice you're wet in the rain, but when you dive into a pool, you're just in the water.

Like eyes adjusting to the darkness, once you've adjusted to the loudest possible white noise, the commotion within the cacophony comes into focus.

There's the sudden wave of laughter and cheer rising up from a table that has shared some good news or a particularly clever joke, before settling back into the sea.

Then there are the waiters carrying live seafood to tables for the "head of the table" to inspect for size and liveliness. Opaque eyes on a fish mean it's almost dead. The harder the crab or lobster tries to escape from the bucket, the better it is.

And then the ceramic percussion goes into a real crescendo when a table is being reset for the next guests -- quite a performance if you've never seen it before.

As soon as the previous guests have left the table, a waiter first picks up all the cutlery and uses them as tools to scrape any leftovers onto the table -- you'll see why later. Then he stacks the small plates around the edge of a big plate to make a bigger plate. Then he throws the rest of the cups, bowls, teapots and cutlery into the middle to hold the small plate "edges" up. Finally, he lifts the whole thing in 1 move into a tray which is whisked off by the bus boy back to the kitchen.

He removes the glass lazy-susan from the middle of the table, grabs the 4 corners of the white plastic table cloth, wraps all the rest of the mess inside and takes it away. Underneath, is another white plastic tablecloth ready to go.

The next waiter is ready with stacks of new settings, still hot from the dishwasher. He wipes down the lazy-susan and places it back in the center. Then seemingly with the same precision a poker dealer tosses cards into the exact right spot, he flings all the ceramics into place. Like clockwork that ants would envy, the whole process takes less than 2 minutes.

Not an uncommon bonus act to the spectacle is when they need to expand a table to accommodated more people. Large, plywood circles are placed on top of tables to make them bigger. A waiter will roll these enormous table tops on edge through the narrow spaces between tables. Sometimes, he'll be blocked by a couple of old Chinese people, already hard of hearing, making white noise. "Excuse me, I need to get by", the waiter will say in a direct yet polite tone. If they are still oblivious, the waiter then has to raise his voice, exhibiting a -- most of the time -- controlled exasperation.

And of course there are the children from neighbouring tables who form play troupes for the evening. Children in any culture are rowdy, but never was there a reprimand from the adults to quiet down -- that would be ironic, wouldn't it? In reality, you can barely hear them except for the occasional high shriek of excitement. Of more concern to the adults is that the children stop long enough to greet a relative or family friend in a way that doesn't lose face, and most importantly, to eat. Chinese families love to force feed their children and 6 year old me, first grandson on both sides of my family, was the sole target of eager feeders. You know, there is a such a thing as overwhelming love -- not a bad thing, but overwhelming nonetheless.

I remember one time sitting in front of a bowl of rice with so much food piled on top of it that not only could I not see any of the rice, I think the pile was taller than the top of my head. I felt how daunting the task was, but being a dutiful Chinese grandchild, I began the arduous task of trying to eat all this food. This would, as it turns out, be an impossible task. Every time I made any headway, some relative or another would pile on more food and I would end up with more than I started with. The only thing stopping them really, was how much food they could pile on without it toppling out of the bowl. If there was such a thing as a "food treadmill", this was it.

By some miracle -- the adults must have been distracted for some time -- I managed to make it all the way down to the rice! But before I could celebrate my triumph, my grandmother came over and seeing that there was no food on my rice said, "Why aren't you eating?!" That was it. This was just too hard. I could feel the crying swell up in me. I tried to hold it back for fear of embarrassment, but no force on Earth could have held it back. The only thing I could do was pull the brim of my red cap down to cover my face, leaving my grandmother utterly confused, as there was no way I could muster any words to explain to her.

Luckily, not all my memories of Chinese restaurants are like that. More often, it was sitting next to my relatively quiet grandfather. He always had a bottle of Johnny Walker which he brought himself and whenever the roast duck came, he'd ask the waiter to bring him a dish of Szechuan pepper salt which he used to dip the duck in. He was mostly focused on enjoying his meal, stopping occasionally to add an insightful comment amid the banter. Even with so much going on all around me, possibly the memory I associate most with Chinese restaurants is the smell of Johnny Walker and Szechuan pepper salt.

Ingredients

• 1 block tofu
• 1 chili
• 1 clove garlic
• chopped green onions
• Szechuan pepper salt -- You can also use Szechuan pepper or white pepper and salt as a substitute.
• corn starch
• cooking oil

Method

• Cut tofu into 1.5-2 cm cubes.
• Cover tofu with corn starch.

• Heat oil in a pan over medium heat. You want enough oil to cover the tofu about half way. You can also deep fry them if you want.
• Add tofu when the oil is hot. Try to fry all sides evenly until a crust forms.

• Remove tofu and pour out most of the oil (carefully!). Leave as much oil as you would for frying normally. You can use the extra oil you poured out to make chili oil!
• Add chili, garlic and green onions to the pan and fry them until they are fragrant.

• Add tofu back to the pan and toss while sprinkling with Szechuan pepper salt. You can be quite liberal here, as it is a lot less salty than regular salt.
• Have a taste to see if it's enough, then plate and serve.

This dish is popular at Chinese late night restaurants -- late night Chinese food is a whole other culture I'll have to write about. It goes well with congee and is a great accompaniment for beer drinking. It can also be served with toothpicks à la hors d'oeuvre.