$100 Bucks For A Crab?!?!

I had to share about this story because I'm just so upset. I feel like such an idiot for letting this happen yet I know better and have learned a lot since then.

So I went with Scott to see Inception a couple of weekend's ago. It was my second time seeing it, his first. The theatre was in this mega mall complex so we decided to grab dinner before the show. There were a ton of restaurants to choose from and ultimately we decided on this Chinese restaurant that I can't recall the name of now. So the restaurant's specialty were crabs so when we sat down, we checked out the menu and the first 3 pages were of different crab dishes. And we do love seafood so we decided, why not? So the waiter came over to take our order. We order 3 things - the crab, a squid dish, and some noodles. The waiter recommended we get their famous crab dish so we went with his recommendation. Then he had us go to the fish tanks and pick out the crab we'd like. There were really big ones and really small ones so we chose one in between. After our meal arrived, we were really happy with our decision. It was a great meal, but we had to hurry so we could make it in time for our movie. As we were finishing we asked the waiter for the check. When the check came, it was a lot more than I expected but since I was in such a rush, I really didn't think much of it - I just asked for Scott's card and we paid the bill. When he got the bill back to sign the receipt, he looked over at me and said, "Babe, the bill's $930?" Only then did it start to register that that was a LOT of money. At that point, we didn't know what to do. The card was already charged. We were taken for as rubes! We left feeling completely deflated. This was a Chinese meal which is typically always the cheaper option compared to western meals AND we only ordered three dishes. How could the bill possibly be over $100 US dollars?!?!?! And it's not like the crab was massive. It was one crab and couldn't have been more than 2lbs. We were pissed and upset with ourselves (i.e. me) and I felt like a fool. I didn't understand. They were so nice. It was such a simple meal - how could one crab cost almost $100 US dollars? It just didn't make any sense. After that night, we both learned a big lesson and ever since then, we have been much better. We scrutinize every bill we receive. We take the bill from the waiter and take our time with it. And we'll never buy anything at market price again. We'll always ask exactly how much everything is BEFORE we decide to order it. The thing is, there was no price on the menu for the crabs. And it was  a restaurant in a shopping mall - it wasn't exactly the four seasons we're talking about here. AND here, they never leave you the bill on the table to pay when you're ready. You have to ask for the bill and when they bring it to you, they hold it in their hand and tell you how much it is. Since then, I've had to take the bill out of 3 different restaurant waiters hands so that I could hold the bill and look at it. So I guess they took advantage of the naive overly polite Americans who by the way, can't read a lick of Chinese. It sucked, big time.

BUT the one redeeming thing is that since then I've been paying a lot of attention to prices for crabs and in my neighborhood I've started noticing there are some shops selling crabs for around $400 per crab. So that's the only thing that makes me feel a little better and think, ok maybe, just maybe we didn't get completely hosed. Guess we'll never really know unless one of you try this crab restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui and tell me how much they charged you!