Guess where I’m eating?

All I’m going to say is that the chef-owner of this Chinese restaurant, whose name is none of your business (for now), likes to clutter your table with edible gifts long before you’ve had a chance to glance at the menu — an eight-page syllabus that doesn’t include any of the dishes that you see in the above photo (just in case you thought you’d try to cheat).

I have no idea if the kitchen delivers the same culinary gifts each day, but when I had lunch here earlier this week, our server brought us a cucumber salad with red peppers and cloves of raw garlic; mung beans with chile paste; daikon radishes soaked in soy and sesame oil; and carrots with kao fu, a spongy wheat gluten.

If you know where I’m eating, you can go get your own…