37/100

Last night, I went out to dinner with a friend. Ambling aimlessly about Fulham, we happened upon a small but welcoming Vietnamese restaurant. The smells emanating from the open door were delicious, but what nailed it for us was the long list of glowing customer reviews taped to the window next to it. It sounded like we were about to enter a culinary paradise on earth. What didn't occur to me was that the website the reviews were taken from might allow for sorting by overall score.

The dinner started out well enough. My companion found a starter on the menu that she loved and ebulliently got the process of ordering food going. I followed up by picking a bottle of wine, which was the first item to arrive at our table. It was up to me to judge its quality, a task I have performed often enough but never with much conviction. What am I looking for? This time it seemed obvious. Upon the very first sniff, my nose vehemently objected to further contact with what was a rather foul bouquet.

Only five years earlier, one could have been reasonably sure to find the culprit in a rotten cork. These days, corks are often made synthetically, and more and more bottles come with a screw cap. It would be very embarrassing indeed to have a bottle returned as corked and be met with incredulous stares because no cork ever stuck in the bottle's neck. So it was with some trepidation that I handed the bottle to the waitress.

My fears were unfounded because my nose had been right. We got a new bottle and hastily mumbled excuses – though bizarrely our excuses for causing trouble (surely a British thing) were more vocal. Never mind. With a tasty Portuguese white finally on our table we could commence the meal. The starter was as delicious as my friend had promised, but with the entrée came the second unpleasant surprise of the evening.

I had chosen one of the house specialties, a grilled fish platter rarely found outside the Hanoi region, dish number 100 on the menu. What I received instead was a fried noodle bowl sprinkled with miniature spring rolls, also known as 99. Granted, sometimes I mumble, but 99 and 100 are far enough apart phonetically that I can't possibly find fault in me. My only explanation is that the name of the dish I didn't order sounds similar to 100 in Vietnamese. The waitress offered to quickly cook up my initial order, but I declined. We hadn't come for two dinners in sequence, but to dine together.

Going through the rice noodles of number 99, I realized the hilarity of the incident. Just recently I had received someone else's pizza but only noticed the unexpected presence of olives after taking a few hearty bites. With some luck, the pork sausages hadn't made the pizza I had ordered unpalatable to the other party in the swap. On yet another occasion, I had ordered a cheese cake with my coffee but had received something decidedly squishy. I couldn't convince the waiter that he had mistakenly brought me angle food cake.

So last night was the third time in as many months that I didn't get to eat what I had ordered. As I don't have food allergies or religious dietary requirements and I'm open to new experiences, I take it with a smile and enjoy what's on my plate. But just imagine I would already be running the project that has been going through my head for quite some time now. Mistakes would be inexcusable.

I have long been looking for a creative way to rate restaurants, somewhat objectively but with a fair measure of playfulness. Ordering the same dish would allow for direct comparisons but only work with restaurants of the same kind. I do this already whenever I eat Indian. The taste of the saag paneer serves as proxy for the quality of the restaurant. Between different cuisines, objective comparisons are more difficult. Pretty much the only thing that remains constant are the numbers on the menu, and ordering the same number could substitute for ordering the same dish. While it might be too philosophical to pick 42, any other number higher than 20 – to avoid the starters – would do. Who could argue with a nice prime number like 37? Incidentally, this would be the rating, out of 100, that I give the Vietnamese restaurant where we dined last night.