Enter the Main Garden of unearthly delights

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Welcome to the International House of Gastrointestinal Difficulties.

Whether the name of your particular poison is General Tso's Chicken, Bar-B-Q Spare Ribs, or the infamous FBCWGS (Fried Boneless Chicken with Garlic Sauce), chances are that if you eat regularly at Main Garden you have had, on at least one occasion, an experience similar to that of frequent customer Dave Lee, MC '00: "The Garden was the primary reason for my poor academic performance freshman year. I'd wolf down a bunch of Main Garden, pass out, sleep through all of my classes, and wake up the next afternoon with a hangover. I'd tell myself I was going to give it up, but that same evening I wouldn't be able to do anything but think about ordering more Garden until finally I did, and I'd eat a bunch more and pass out twitching again. I had two heart attacks that year."

No number of tear-jerking testimonials, however, can stem the late-night stream of students to the corner of Elm and Howe Streets. The Garden's cheap fare is the best culinary guilty pleasure in New Haven. It beats the crap out of its direct competitors, like the insufferably snobby Hunan Wok, as well as those trafficking in lesser food genres, like Popeye's. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America could run countless bleached-out pseudo-documentary interviews with customers like Dave, emphasizing the MSG headaches, the bloated listlessness, and the immense probability of permanent brain damage; it would have no effect. The activists would find that even the use of their ultimate rhetorical tool, that heroin-chic chick who lays waste to kitchens, would prove fruitless. No amount of wild wok-smashing, coupled with shrieking cries of "This is what Garden does to your family! This is what Garden does to your life!" could get her past the fact that she's looking pretty thin and could probably use some super-yummy, filling Chinese food.

Nevertheless, hope remains for hapless, increasingly destitute Main Garden fiends who often find themselves there for the fifth time in a week (as happened to me at least once during a "not cooking food anymore" phase). All the symptoms: the pangs; the sitting hunched in the high-school cafeteria chairs looking like an ER waiting room patient embarrassed to reveal the railroad spike protruding from his thorax; the staring idly at the calendar that looks like it was made by the Cantonese version of the Mentos Corp.; the gorging; the dreadful early-morning bowel complications. All these diseases have only one cure, and it's called Lobster Cantonese Style (seasonal prices).

It's ironic that Main Garden's more expensive dishes contain the seeds of its own undoing. Yet when the Garden, like Cindy Crawford, tries to reach for greater heights, it falls flat and causes shudders of pain to those who witness it. This pain, if great enough, may be enough to break a fiend's cycle.

In search of a greater high than my beloved FBCWGS, I ordered both the Happy Family Meal ($9.95) and the Lobster Cantonese ($14.95--it must be the off-season for long-dead lobsters). Happy Family contains shrimp and slices of chicken, pork, and beef, mixed in with some sprout things, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and traditional brown sauce that tastes as traditional and brown as it is. The beef, chicken, and pork look and taste like bigger versions of the meats that get mixed into fried rice. The shrimp are pleasantly crunchy, and their spinal columns aren't visible, as is often a problem with seafood. The mushrooms look like razed Smurf housing projects. Happy Family's biggest problem is its size. It comes in a standard Main Garden tin, which doesn't hold enough food for a nuclear family of any stripe, unless they're all as thin as the heroin chick. It didn't make me happy either, but it also didn't put me off my habit.

The Lobster Cantonese, on the other hand, is an Intervention-in-a-Tin. Hieronymus Bosch, famed for his depictions of Hell, could've pinned this thing onto a panel, signed it, and called it a day. It's a bright red lobster, hacked to bits, with the pieces left floating indiscriminately in a chunky grey liquid. Little yellow bits that might be corn are suspended in the mixture. Loose legs occasionally surface, only to be sucked back down again by the vile ooze. The meat tastes kind of crustacean once all the shattered bits of shell are extracted from it. I tested the meal on a four-man focus group, and comments ranged from "If I spread this sauce on my hand, it looks like I puked there" to "I'd rather eat dining hall food than this." Also, if you run enough tap water through the lobster's head, its brain falls out. It's a moment of clarity.

There is hope. For you. For your friends. Choose a job. Choose life. Choose the Lobster Cantonese.

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