For the past three months, I have been living and working remotely from London. My neighborhood, Covent Garden, is buzzing with cute restaurants, crowded pubs, and Broadway shows. It is a much trendier and centrally located neighborhood from what I’m used to. Although I have lived in high-cost-of-living New York City for over ten years now, I am a frugal girl and have always rented in places far from cocktail bars with live jazz and the like. Sure, I stay in city centers when I travel, but the past three months have been my first time living for an extended period of time in a Covent Gardeny part of town.

As my time in London is coming to a close, I have been reflecting on my favorite parts of being based in Covent Garden. It has been wonderful to step outside and immediately be in the center of the city action. By tube, it is easy to get anywhere. I can walk to Trafalgar Square in 5 minutes, Big Ben in 10. Notably, I am a 15 minute walk from Wong Kei.

One evening early on in our London residence, Petr and I were craving Chinese food and found Wong Kei online. Wong Kei is a restaurant in Central London’s Chinatown with a 3.5-star Google rating. It is a two-storied restaurant with large, open floor plan layouts for prime people-watching action.

The restaurant is full of activity. There are roasted ducks and pigs hanging in the window, and three older Chinese gentlemen making soup on the right as you walk in on the ground floor. There’s always someone in the corner devoted to making endless pots of jasmine tea. There are dishes being churned out elsewhere and arriving in food elevators, waiters delivering steaming hot dishes here and there. Sometimes groups of drunkards would come into Wong Kei and chat and laugh so loud that I’d rush to eat my food so I could leave. I saw Chinese families, British football fans with matching jerseys, working men dining solo. People from all walks of life seem to find their way to Wong Kei.

Most of the complaints on Wong Kei’s Google reviews center around their horrible service. They are notoriously rude. The grumpy staff does not speak good English and they do not smile. The workers are on a mission to do their jobs and make their paychecks and you don’t want to get in their way.

To give you some concrete examples, I once saw another table nearby with a delicious looking soup. I asked a waitress what dish it was and she quickly said “It’s on the menu” without stopping what she was doing, and went on her way.

The restaurant is cash only. I once watched two ladies at the table next to us put a credit card on the table. Big mistake. A waiter pointed to the card and screamed at them “CASH ONLY!”. The ladies look startled and a bit ashamed. One of them immediately got up to go to the ATM.

The staff is ruthless about having people share tables to save space. There are some awkward tables of silence, and there are some tables with strangers laughing together about the awkwardness of sharing a table together.

I always order the same thing, Crispy Noodle with Beef. The food is consistently good, and the portions are generous. And when the waiters bring food to your table, they put whatever dish down in front of you, not caring to ask who ordered what.

While there are countless restaurants in a 15-minute walking radius of Covent Garden, I am drawn to Wong Kei. Petr and I eat there on average two nights a week and we laugh together often about what we witness at Wong Kei.

I left London to go to a work conference last week and was very much looking forward to having dinner at Wong Kei when I returned. I got off my plane, headed straight to Covent Garden to meet up with Petr and his friend Sebastian who was visiting from out of town. It was his first time in London and we were excited to show him the magic of Wong Kei. However, as we approached the restaurant, we saw that the lights were closed and there were paper signs taped to the door. Sadly, they would be closed for renovations, and we wouldn’t be able to dine at Wong Kei again before we leave London.

I was sad but there was no time to linger. Sebastian was hungry and it was a busy Friday night. We quickly found a Chinese restaurant nearby that did not have a line out the door. We were welcomed and seated with a smile. Immediately, I could not help but compare everything about the new restaurant to our beloved Wong Kei.

The service was much better. The waiters were attentive and friendly. They served water when we sat down instead of tea. They had a different kind of chili paste. The menu was similarly long. They even had our favorite dishes from Wong Kei. I ordered the Crispy Noodle with Beef and they cooked it quickly. The taste was good. The portions were even more generous and the beef tasted higher quality than one that Wong Kei used… but it just wasn’t Wong Kei.

The new restaurant felt so tame and normal. Those smiles were fake. The layout of the space was more compact and everything was– well, boring.

One thing that I’ve loved about being in Covent Garden was being able to have dinner at Wong Kei. If you’re brand new to Wong Kei, you may get yelled at. But once you know how Wong Kei operates, it was satisfying to be able to sit back at the end of the day, order your favorite dish, sip tea, and watch the show. In some ways, going to Wong Kei is like going to the theatre.. but better! The soup-making gentlemen and the rude waiters that we got to know over our many visits through observation and interaction were like the recurring characters, and it was much more real, more nuanced, more interesting.

At the new restaurant, there was no tea and there was no show.

Over dinner, Sebastian asked me how I’ve liked being in London. I told him I have enjoyed it but that London feels much like any other city I’ve been to. He agreed that because of globalization, most restaurants, including the one that we were in, feel similar, no matter what city you are in.

Will I miss London? I can’t say. But I sure will miss Wong Kei.