Restaurants and more Reilly books

“Then the night grew deathly quiet, his face lost all expression
He said, ‘if you’re gonna play the game boy, you gotta learn to play it right.’”

-- Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

I am in mourning—my favourite chicken restaurant is dying. Of attempted (I hope) suicide.

Attempted and committed are not the same thing. Committed means the act succeeded.

I remember back when I was a kid of fifteen, and I’d go with the youth group to the Kenny Rogers’ Roasters outlet at Century Square. Later I went with my mom and bro, and get rotisserie-roasted chicken with meat cooked to perfection. Nutritionists say the skin has twice as much fat as the meat, but it was so well-done I didn’t care.

If nutrition has ever mentioned exceptions to the “tastes good, bad for you, tastes bad, good for you” rule, I’d love to hear them. (Just kidding; don’t write in with them.)

But am I the only one who remembers you could get a quarter-chicken set with two side dishes (chicken-diced whipped potato beside salty, creamy macaroni and cheese, mmm), warm soup and a cool drink for 12 bucks? We’d go there week after week, listening to Rogers’ rasp and reading menus and faces in the half-darkness.

Then the Century Square outlet closed, and I learned once again that change is the only constant in life. I swallowed it and moved on.

Fast-forward 6 years—I’m 21 for a moment, to paraphrase Five for Fighting—and looking for a new laptop at Suntec City when lo and behold, a Roasters outlet showed up at the basement. I decided I’d splurge and indulge in some good ol’ memories… but I realized something was wrong when my meal ended up costing SGD16.30.

What? What?!? But I handed the money over, and wondered if it was my imagination telling me the Kenny’s Famous Corn Muffin was smaller than I remembered.

Then a month later I brought my brother. It’s a LONG walk to Suntec from City Hall, and we were grumbling at the crowd when we found the place was under renovation. That didn’t help.

Now it seems they’ve just opened, and I fear they’ve not only stuck a carving knife into their chests, but twisted it.

Let me start with the décor. It wasn’t the Kenny Rogers experience I’m used to, with rough bricks, jade walls, and neon-lit song titles above our heads in dim lighting your eyes have to adjust to but makes the plate before you look oh-so-delicious. That, brothers and sisters, is DEAD. In its place was generic whitewashed wall, harsh fluorescence, and packets of some unknown brand of cereal in recesses on the wall.
And the ordering process is a pain if I ever felt one. We ordered a chicken-wing set only to have the staff mistake it for the lunch menu. Then the order of the lady before me got a little mixed up, as if the staff themselves didn’t know much more than we did. When everything got straightened out we ran into another bottleneck, the stupidest of all.

The cutlery was placed vertically downward.

Here’s a quick geometry refresher—a cylindrical container necessitates placing items vertically. But when said container is opaque, plus customers fresh from handing over their Yusof Ishaks… now they have to lean over and peer in to see if the sticks of metal visible to the eye end in skewer points, a scoop, or a blade.

Yeah, I know it takes a few seconds. But why not save them when you can?

I haven’t even got to the food, and I’m sad to report the renovation made the Kenny Rogers lunch worse, not better. Until the chain gets its act together, I’m saving my money. The chicken isn’t so tender anymore, and the side dishes come in annoying little bowls starched white like every other nook and cranny of the restaurant. Urrgh. I’ve never been able to conceive of rotisserie chicken separated from thick, gooey cheese—but now I can.

Great move, Roasters. I’ll still give your other outlets a chance—but let’s not push that knife in any further, shall we?

#

Fads and fashions must someday end, their slaves rushing to embrace new masters every turn of a very, very fickle cycle somebody with The Power decides on. We then rush to feed Them with money, money and more money.

I say this because I am extremely jealous of Matthew Reilly.

As in Australian thriller writer Matthew Reilly.

Why oh why can’t I write like that? His first novel, Contest, was spotted by executives at Pan Macmillian after self-publication... and soon he had hit the big time, churning out the most outlandish thrillers I’ve had the misfortune to pick up.

I read Contest. And now I am hooked. A writer-friend of mine took one read, and came away with a one-word review.
Woah...

Contest never lets up the action with its tale of a young doctor and his daughter trapped in the New York State Library, which for just one night will serve as the venue of a battle-to-the-death match between seven people... and our MD has been chosen to take part. I finished the entire book in three hours—it was so tight, so focused, so how-are-we-going-to-get-out-of-this I got very little swimming done the day I brought it to the pool.

Make no mistake—this was a young writer of great power, drive and the ability to tell a genuinely terrifying, edge-of-your-seat story of adventure and survival.

(Did I mention it was science fiction?)

Then I tried Ice Station, in which Reilly tells us all about his new hero, Lieutenant Shane M. “Scarecrow” Schofield... the man who made me use was in my review of Contest. Reilly’s “Scarecrow Trilogy”, Ice Station, Area 7 and finally Scarecrow packs more impossible, James Bond-worthy escapades into each book than most writers do in their lifetimes. Supposedly it’s set in our world, and as such Reilly doesn’t feel bound by the “one impossible thing at a time” rule in—you know—science fiction.

SF these works are not. The writer of Contest now plays fast and loose with the very fabric of possibility, throwing in crossbow-wielding French commandoes, a spaceship hidden under the Antarctic ice, and (literally) killer whales swimming in the water under the besieged Wilkes Ice Station. All the while I couldn’t stop taking in the stupidity of it all. A lesser writer would have made me toss the book aside.

But I couldn’t.

You see, Reilly doesn’t just throw in mindless whiz-bang action for its own sake—it’s mindless whiz-bang action for a higher goal.