I didn’t think I could have gotten Nik through the door of a place like this. Of course, a few hours ago, I would have said the same thing about my dad. He must have been a lot hungrier than he was letting on, though, because he didn’t even growl when I flagged down the waitress.
Los Hermanos Li was a lot bigger on the inside than it had looked from the street. The main dining room was huge and packed, but in a long overdue stroke of luck, the staff spoke Cantonese. Not that we couldn’t have managed in English, but you always got better service when you spoke the language. A few minutes later, I’d secured us a table right next to the kitchen door, the ultimate power position for dim sum. Every delicacy-laden cart that came out had to roll past us to get to the rest of the room, which meant we always got first pick of the freshest dishes, and just as the internet had promised, the pickings looked damn good.
Soon, our table was covered in plates of char siu served on a bed of fried wonton “chips,” fried noodles tossed in queso fundido, a bowl of white cheese dip with giant pickled-jalapeno bao on the side for dipping, and various other ridiculousness. They even had a bottomless margarita made with Chinese white liquor, which I totally ordered. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea after my first taste, but hey, booze was booze, and if I’d ever needed a drink, it was tonight.
“Are you sure this is safe?” my father asked, poking at the pile of bright-green tomatillo-and-porkbelly potstickers I’d grabbed for us. “It smells of food coloring.”
I shrugged and reached over with my chopsticks to steal one of the dumplings off his plate, dunking it gratuitously in salsa before sticking it in my mouth. “Tastes fine to me,” I reported. “But they have sushi on the other cart if you’d prefer.”
“That’s even worse,” Yong said with a shudder. “As they say back home, ‘if you can’t see the ocean, don’t eat the fish.’”
I didn’t know if that old adage held true in the age of refrigeration, but sushi from a cheap Mexican-Chinese fusion restaurant on the edge of an Underground tourist trap probably wasn’t the greatest idea. Honestly, though, I didn’t care what he ate. I was too busy stuffing my own face. After two months of healthy living, I’d forgotten how good cheap processed carbs could taste. There was something about all those unpronounceable chemicals that was just so delicious. And probably toxic. I was pretty sure a margarita made with actual lime juice wouldn’t be that shade of neon green, but hey! Sometimes poisoning yourself was fun, and holy crap was I ready for some fun, even if the only person I had to party with was my grumpy old codger of a dad.
Speaking of my dad, he must have really been starving. After barely two minutes of turning up his nose, he broke down and started to eat. Once he got going, he was a machine, tearing through plates of food as fast as the carts could bring them. By the time he finally stopped, I’d already lapsed into and come out of my carb coma. I wasn’t even drunk I’d eaten so much, but I had zero regrets.
“See?” I told my dad as the busboys attempted to clear the wreckage. “Not so bad.”
“It was terrible, and you know it,” he said, glaring at me. “We raised you to have better taste than this.”
“Expensive tastes are a liability,” I replied sagely. “The wise Undergrounder cultivates an appreciation for all edible substances. I’ve eaten things out of food trucks you wouldn’t believe.”
“I don’t want to hear what you’ve eaten out of trucks,” my father said, his face horrified. “You do remember you’re mortal, right? Vulnerable to dying from poison?”
I laughed then stopped, eyes going wide. “Wait, was that a joke?”
“It was a legitimate concern,” he said without a trace of humor.
I should have known better, but grousing over what your child ate was perfectly normal parental behavior, so I couldn’t be too miffed. Given how it had started, tonight had turned out surprisingly decent. I’d finally gotten to try a restaurant that had been on my list for over a year, and while he’d made it clear he considered eating here slumming of the lowest degree, it had still been pretty damn entertaining to watch my dad eat ten normal people’s worth of food. Most amazing of all, though, nothing bad had happened. We’d been here for almost an hour, and dragons hadn’t burst in to grab us. There’d been no disasters, no crises or magical apocalypses. We hadn’t even argued! We’d just had dinner like two normal people.
That was a miracle in and of itself and probably a sign that we should go. While I’d clearly been right about the lack of dragons in Loveland, it was never a good idea to push your luck, especially luck as bad as mine. We’d paid the All You Can Eat fee before we sat down, so technically we were free to go at any time, but I still wanted to tip the staff to make up for the mountain of dishes my dad had generated. I was standing in line at the register kiosk by the front door to do just that since I couldn’t use my phone’s wallet feature without letting Sibyl back onto the internet. But just as I finished tapping the DFZ’s cash card against the screen to okay the extra payment, I heard the bells on the door jingle behind me.
I can’t say why I looked. The front door had been jingling every five seconds since we’d arrived. But there was something about this jingle that made me glance over my shoulder, which was how I came face-to-chest with a very armored, very upset
