2010 Jul 12 Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
In TheBeijinger.com forums, there’s a thread with the comment: “The only thing more disgusting than the food at Origus is watching fat little kids wolf down insane portions.”
That fat kid was me. The year was 1985. It was my birthday party, I was buzzing on food additives and very, very happy. That was the last time I saw chicken nuggets, fish sticks, plastic pizza, ice cream and beakers of fizzy drinks on the same table. Until now.
With its 40 branches around Beijing, Origus is like the children’s birthday party that never ends … only with beer. You can fill your face daily with the sort of reckless abandon your mum thought prudent to permit just once a year.
The food is … generously seasoned. And sweet. Sweetest of all is the pizza. Even their meat feast equivalent, peculiarly named “Western Scenery,” tasted like cake. On a scale of “real” to “processed,” it’s somewhere down near bubble gum.
Almost everything else is deep-fried, nugget-shaped and drying out under lamps. The desserts are utterly unfathomable, like a wedge of something yellow with the texture of bicycle tire, and another thing with olive slices on top. But they do have some real food: hot wings, spicy chicken breast, spaghetti. And it’s possible to assemble a passable salad of cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, corn and dill pickle. Combine that with lots of beer and half-decent egg tarts, and your RMB 49 seems an OK deal. The best bit is serving yourself ice cream from the soft-serve machine. For a seven-year-old fatty having the time of his life, that would have been the biggest treat of all.
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HuanChu
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
Wow dood.
Is there really so little going on in Beijing at the moment, that the blog posts are reduced to reviewing years old establishments, that most expats already know are of bad quality?
What's next? An in-depth analysis of how Big Mac's are made with less than 10% real meat, and that many Chinese bars serve watered down draft?
A very smart man wrote:
zhenlai
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
Okay Numb nuts, your MASTER begs and screams for reviews and then when someone does one you jump on them like a cat on a disabled mouse. Make up your tiny mind. The person was doing you a favor and you ruined the moment. I am going to post this in your thread also so you are sure to see it.
YOU NEED TO APOLOGIZE TO THIS POSTER.
美国鬼子
Fred Railsback
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
I agree with Zhenlai that HuanChu's critical response to the Origus critique was out of line. Just because everybody has tried the pizza and gotten wasted in Origus before doesn't mean that its not funny for us to read about another person's perspective on the experience. It's experiences that people can relate to that make for good writing. I couldn't help chuckling out loud about the "wedge of something yellow with the texture of bicycle tire" b/c I had been there before.
jo_jo.lives
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
What a douche PanCho
kiwuk
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
Huanchu is clearly having hormonal problems to make such an unwarranted attack on the poster.
Some people reading might be recent arrivals and in any case it was an amusing rendition better than the" this place sucks variety" or conversely those clearly written by the owner.
Dood = dude? Is this a spelling variation peculiar to America? The US English spell check is screaming otherwise.
Is this from the same literary prodigy that had to have "razed" explained to him on an internet TV programme by a seppo property developer?
Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me: the brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I invent or is invented on me.
HuanChu
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
This was not an attack on the poster, but more the fact that it was a review of an aging establishment, rather than something new or relatively unheard of, which is what I thought tbj blog was for.
If you appreciate what he has written, cool. I was just expressing my opinion about it.
Oh, and 'dood' is the superior spelling of the word 'dude'. So now you know.
A very smart man wrote:
Iain S
Re: Bad For You: Origus Pizza Buffet
Just to clarify - "Bad For You" is one part of a pair of columns featured in the restaurant section of the Beijinger's print magazine - "Good For You"/"Bad For You."
Fred Railsback seems to have seen the point of "Bad For You" - it's a lighthearted look at Beijing's many fast food dens. Most of us eat in them from time to time (if not more regularly), some of them are enjoyable, some of them are downright weird, and we don't see any harm with pointing that out.
Point taken though - when removed from the context of the magazine, this web posting does look like we're presenting Origus as something fantastically new or noteworthy - of course, that's not the intention. In future, we'll likely post both "Good For You" and "Bad For You" in one blog post to retain the spirit of the columns as they appear in the magazine.
Iain Shaw
Deputy Managing Editor
the Beijinger