When I was in college, we used to go to this Mongolian Barbecue place because we could eat a ton of food for a very reasonable price. This was all that was necessary to qualify as a good place to eat, which is sort of pathetic, since the place was actually not all that great at all. But that is how the story starts.

So one night some time in my junior year, this large crowd of sophomores was going to some weird Thai place down the road in Pomona (which, at the time, was among the top cities in the country... in the homicide and violent crime categories!). They asked, so I joined them.

I remember being utterly confused during the ordering process, since the more experienced visitors seemed to have memorized the menu and were ordering numbered items at an alarming rate. The food arrived, the plates of it were passed around, and a little bit of this and that ended up on my plate. We paid, and we left.

That was just about all the more I remembered about that place. In face, I wasn't really sure where we had gone, nor was I certain of exactly what the name of the establishment was. All I knew for sure was that it was "The Thai place" and that these underclassmen frequented that place quite a bit.

Fast forward a little bit, to a night when we were all not quite sober. My good friend Jim Suggs was up studying for some outragious chemistry event, and was hungry at 2am. Thai was the obvious choice, since they were open until 3am, but he didn't want to go all by himself, so I joined him. Another strange experience, including an instance where one of the waitresses actually mixed into her rapid foreign speech the ear-catching sounds of "Beep Beep." The place was hopping, and she was behind another waitress and moving quite fast, but I remember thinking it was sort of strange, humorous (a very American thing to blurt out, I guess), and definitely memorable. I took a good look around and noticed the powder blue and peach decor and the dance music playing on the radio over the hum of full tables and many, many non-English-speaking customers. It was just one of those nights that sticks in your head.

Now fast forward to my senior year, when this "unique" freshman named Beston Barnett moved in with myself and a few friends of mine. We hit it off okay, and one night, he and my friend Bill Gribble suggested trying this sort of "dishwater soup" at this Thai place down the road. I had all but forgotten the place, but I figured that it was something to do that did not involve staying on campus, so why not? We went.

Upon our arrival, we were seated, and we ordered a single bowl of the lemon grass soup (Tom Yum Goong) with shrimp, lemon grass, galanga, and Thai chiles in it... the standard ingredients, but I had never tried that one. The bowl arrived, and it was easily enough for twice our small group, but we jumped right in. I was amazed. It was amazingly hot, and seemed to be eating away at the inside of my mouth, but I rather enjoyed it.

One of the small soup bowls got some liquid trapped under it and began sliding on its own along the not-so-level table, which immediately got our attention. Rather than a rational explanation, we chalked it up to the mystery of the Thai place, and we decided that this would be a place that we would return to in the near future.

Was that ever an understatement.

In the few weeks that followed, we found ourselves there at least two more times or so. On one occasion, a large group of about six or eight of us all piled into Bill's VW van and tooled down to Pomona for some Thai grub. We arrived to find a few police cars in the parking lot and an officer or two inside. We saw our favorite waitress, Tan (who, as it turns out, was the one with the "Beep Beep" that I had seen the year before), and she was quite shaken-looking. It seems that moments before our arrival, an armed robbery had just been completed, and the customers and staff had just gotten up off the floor to collect themselves and to give reports to Pomona's finest. Wow.

We finished a very enjoyable meal, and without really discussing it, we all decided to chip in to the "Tan tip recovery fund" since they had taken all of the tips for the evening. We all put together our cash, and we ended up leaving about $35 on a $35 bill. We didn't mention it to Tan, instead simply wishing everyone a good evening (given what had just happened, this was really just being gracious) and walking out the door. We were just piling into the van.

The door of the restaurant burst open and Tan came running out into the parking lot waving a wad of cash, telling us to wait. She said something to the effect that we were all crazy, and that instead of leaving such a large tip, we should all just come back. She handed me the tip money, keeping $5 for herself, and gave me a hug [which is almost completely unheard-of in Thai culture].

When Beston, Bill, and I returned to the restaurant some days later, Tan treated us like part owners in the place. If there was something she could slide to us for free, she did it. She remembered everything we liked, and brought it all out post haste. It was all terrific, and she almost seemed to be having fun. Our only complaint, as we finished off the last of everything, was that it just wasn't quite spicy enough.

"Tan," I said, "it wasn't that spicy. Next time we want to cry."

"Okay," she replied, "next time, you no cry, you no pay."

We paid. In fact, I think that was the only time in my many visits to that restaurant that I actually ended up paying well into the next day. At any rate, the food was incredibly hot, and the fact that we actually managed to choke it down (with many, many glasses of Thai iced tea) impressed them all. We were dumb white guys doing untold damage to our innards, but they enjoyed the sight just the same. A trend was born.

From that point on, the three of us became known at the restaurant for ordering the hottest food possible. As word of our stupidity spread across the too-small campus of Harvey Mudd College, the waitresses were not at all surprised to hear orders for food "Hot like Dan gets it." They never hit that upper rung on the spice ladder for most of the younger American customers, because, well, it is sort of dangerous.

Well, my senior year wore on, and we reached the semester break. We went our separate ways for the holidays, agreeing to send Tan a post card from our respective home towns. We sent them to the restaurant, since that is the only address we had for her, and of course everyone there read them and knew what was going on. When we returned to school in January, we rushed right out to our Thai place and were greeted with Tan, overjoyed at our return.

But we were also greeted by the other members of the staff there, who now knew us as "the ones who sent Tan the postcards." We had reached some sort of demented celebrity status, and all of them knew that Tan would be taking care of us no matter where we sat or what time we had arrived.

Tan filled us in on her coworkers. Their nicknames were Pook, Pum, Pam, Mas, Sum, Nang, and others. Eventually, they all knew our names as well, though none of them quite reached Bill's appraisal of Tan as "The best waitress in the whole world." At first listen, this may have seemed a dubious complement, but it really was, and Tan loved it.

So the year wore on some more. Bill and I had gone their the previous semester quite a bit to discuss microprocessor design, which was one of our classes, and we continued that tradition throughout our final semester. But I had a reputation on campus for always being at Thai, so, lacking a vehicle, I was always accepting invitations to join in the 6-mile journey, sometimes more than once per day. My disputed record was 14 visits in one week, plus or minus. Again, I had no car, so I always had to rely on the kindness of classmates when I went.

Sometimes, Bill, Beston and I wanted to go to Thai to get away from those very same classmates, but the mere mention of "Thai" rallied all within earshot. This completely undermined our plans, of course, so we quickly devised the "T" hand signal that began a coordinated, stealthful egress from the company of our unwelcomed guests. It worked every time, and we were once again able to slip away in the van for some late night Thai food.

At some point, I began picking up some Thai vocabulary, including how to say such things as "Thank you," and "You are pretty," which was all we really needed to express our appreciation for their overwhelming kindness. It turns out that Thai people are generally impressed when others attempt to learn their language, so they took to teaching us more, including how to order by name instead of by number, and how to order things extremely spicy (they were especially careful to teach me how to say "a lot" so that I could order things as stupidly-spicy as I liked them. They also taught me how to say "I am crazy," just in case I found myself in another restaurant with a disbelieving crew working...).

To make a long story short, "the Thai babes" turned out to be a high point of the time at Mudd, since they were always friendly (they worked for tips, after all) and were somewhat genuine and sincere (within reason), and they always remembered what our favorites were. Most importantly, none of them were engrossed in the insanity of the HMC curriculum, so our trips to Sanamluang were almost like trips out of the country. Except when we took our take-home tests there...

Well, I still go there to this day when I find myself in the Pomona area (which is not as often as you might think), and Tan is still working there, but only on weekends now, since she has a real job during the week. Apparently, the tips are pretty darn good there, and the area has become a little bit more civilized over the years.

Probably the most amazing thing, to me anyway, is the fact that before that first "dishwater soup" night at the beginning of my final year at Mudd, I probably never would have actively gone to a Thai restaurant. The fact that I became so well-known on campus for eating Thai food so often and for being so enamored with Thai culture lead my first roommate in Silly Valley, Jason Morse, to take me to this little Thai restaurant in Sunnyvale...