{"id":413,"date":"2005-05-25T08:21:26","date_gmt":"2005-05-25T08:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/?p=413"},"modified":"2005-05-25T08:23:13","modified_gmt":"2005-05-25T08:23:13","slug":"ordering-food-at-a-chop-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/archives\/2005\/05\/25\/ordering-food-at-a-chop-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Ordering food at a chop house"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the things that makes life in Nigeria more interesting is the process of ordering food at one of the many chop houses (informal-economy restaurants).  You usually end up playing a guessing game that&#8217;s oddly reminiscent of the Monty Python <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jumpstation.ca\/recroom\/comedy\/python\/cheeseshop.html\">Cheese Shop sketch<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The main rule of the game seems to be that the waiter\/waitress must never reveal what food they actually have except in answer to a specific question.  So, for example, asking &#8220;what food do you have?&#8221; won&#8217;t work.  Instead you have to ask about each individual item that may or may not be available: pounded yam, rice, stew, egussi soup, white soup, garri, semovita, draw soup, &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>A second rule is that most things should be off or that they should have just run out.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a slight variation of this game played in the fast food restaurants of Abuja.  These look like normal Western fast food places and have a large illuminated menu.  Of course, most of the things on the menu are either never available or are not available right now.  The staff won&#8217;t tell you what&#8217;s not available or list what is, instead you have to keep guessing until you find something they actually have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the things that makes life in Nigeria more interesting is the process of ordering food at one of the many chop houses (informal-economy restaurants). You usually end up playing a guessing game that&#8217;s oddly reminiscent of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch. The main rule of the game seems to be that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vso"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}