Sunday, July 06, 2008
Shokudo & 21

Lunch @ Shokudo:
Interesting card payment system. Accumulate the dollar amount of each dish ordered, capped to a maximum of S$100, and make payment before exiting. Saves the hassle of digging for notes and coins every now and then when one wishes to make an order.

Different from a typical restaurant, one doesn't get the chance to warm up the seat for long before making another trip to get more food [no matter what, you've just gotta leave the seat at least once].

Stalls are located at all areas in the restaurant. Seats are self selected. There are no waiters/waitresses to usher to a specific seat. And seats at one side are totally different from those at the other end. Very unique layout.

The array of food are entirely Japanese cuisine as its name suggests. We had a table full of rosti with curry, seafood ramen, assorted mushroom and veg soup, prawns, and omelette seafood rice with chicken chop. In addition, we also had ham and cheese omelette, and cookies & cream ice-cream waffle. I love the latter two! Lip smacking good!

Each of us spent an average of $15 or so. Quite reasonable considering the amount of food we had. And what was more important was the catching up and non-stop teasings! Another thing good about this restaurant is it doesn't chase customers out once they finish their food. We sat in till we decided to go for a movie at 4pm [no earlier plans made on that].

21:
As mentioned above, we settled for 21. Personally, i did enjoy the movie. Perhaps because it had something to do with Math and the stars in the show were fresh and young. I suppose this movie was meant to target teenagers as well as young adults.

Ben, an MIT college student, was offered a place in his dream school - Harvard Medical School. He applied for a Robinson's Scholarship worth $300,000 which aimed to select the elite of the elites. Unfortunately, with his current elitist results, it did not dazzle the Dean for others were equally as good.

With a mundane life, it was almost impossible for him to obtain the Scholarship. And that equalled to him being unable to enrol into Harvard due to the cash shortage.

As he's a genius and extremely gifted in Math, he was approached by one of his lecturers [Micky] to join a "club" where they counted cards.

Counting cards in this case meant -1 for cards (10, J, Q, K), 0 for cards (2-9), +1 for Ace [If i didn't remember wrongly]. The desire to earn that $300,000 instead of trying to rely on the Scholarship, took him to Las Vegas. There, he trumped in Blackjack with the help of his team.

His life changed since then. He found the thrill and earned big through this job. He neglected his friends and 209 competition [an IT competition]. Now, earning $300,000 wasn't enough. He yearned for more. That's when his emotions ruled over his head. No longer counting cards but gambling as they put it.

And that's where he stumbled and fell. He fell real hard. He was worse off than when he wasn't even involved then. Everything was taken away from him - Micky's doing.

But he never gave up. He was determined to get back everything he lost. In cahoots with the Lost Prevention Officer [Cole Williams] in the Las Vegas casino, he outwitted Micky and lured him back to the casino to be the big player.

Micky had an old feud with Cole and the latter wanted to settle it with him. So Micky had his retribution while Ben finally made it to Harvard.

With such an extraordinary life experience, that indeed dazzled the Dean...

Moral of the story: Greed is the root to all evils. Never allow money to rule over your head.

*Pics to be posted up soon*

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