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We tried Taste of China near ACAC in Albemarle Square a few weeks back and really loved the food. We made a second trip this weekend and the food was awesome again.

I ate the Tofu Casserole Sichuan Spicy (left) and Parchayi ate the Spicy Scallions and Chili hotpot (or something like that, right).

Both dishes were fantastic. Taste of China is not a regular American Chinese restaurant (though they do serve up some American Chinese too). This according to them is the real Chinese food. Why O why then are we subject to the same old Chinese food everywhere?

I would call taste of China expensive for a Chinese place but then they don’t serve the tired old Chinese and the portions are generous. The food is closer to Indian Chinese than American Chinese.

Here is a link to the Vegetarian Options on the Menu, and for a good laugh see the last item. I wasn’t brave enough to try it. Maybe you are

Charlottesville now has a new Indian store on Westfield Rd. near the Comcast office called Taste of India.

We’ve been to the new store twice and as compared to Indian Bazaar on Rio, the store is more neatly organized. There are more Frozen options and most of the basics are the same. The store owner has promised to order some stuff that he didn’t have and I’ll find out soon if he did. I’m not sure we really needed another store but if he does deliver on his promise of ordering stuff that the other one doesn’t carry we might end up going there more often.

We tried the new Tara Thai at Barracks Rd this weekend and were completely disappointed with the food. The soup we ordered was lukewarm (not even close to hot). When we complained, they heated it up for us in a microwave for a few minutes. After that it was ok and decent tasting.

The food we ordered was all cold too. We could hear them cooking it and we were sitting about 10 feet from the kitchen so it can’t have become cold in transit. Maybe they just stir fry stuff and dump in cold readymade sauce? and maybe they don’t stir fry long enough for the vegetables to become hot? After complaining again and being served microwave heated food, the temperature was ok. Still not hot but tolerable. Even the fried Tofu was cold. I’ve never had fried tofu cold in a dish before. Taste wise the food was mediocre and the dish I ordered was overly fishy. I threw away the leftovers because when I heated them up later at home they smelled bad. All in all a bad experience. I’ll stick with Thai 99 on JPA and Lemongrass at the corner for good Thai food.

Update 10:15pm 12/10 ET:I got a call from Andrew at Comcast at around 5:30pm and he apologized for my experience and offered to continue my promotion (don’t know for how long) if I continued with cable. But I told him this experience was enough to keep me away from cable and also that cable didn’t offer much in the way of Hindi programming in Charlottesville. He also assured me that my bill has been fixed and I will get a statement in the next couple of weeks with the corrected information and gave me his direct number if I had any more questions or if I decided not to keep DISH and return to cable.

I also got a message from our local Comcast manager! Lesson – if you have problems with comcast that customer service doesn’t solve, post your problem publicly! If that doesn’t work, try calling 703 730 2225 and the email addresses for customer service are:
Customer_Connect1@cable.comcast.com
We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com

Update 1:40pm 12/10 ET:I shot another email to the national comcast folks and supposedly someone will resolve the issue and call me today. See comments.

Update 1:10pm 12/10 ET:So far I have received no calls from the National folks who commented on this post, nor from the local manager and definitely nothing from the supervisor of the rep who actually cut my cable. I really didn’t expect anything better from Concast (really Concast is what they are)

Update 9:45pm 12/09 ET: See the comments on this post for a response from Mark Casem from Comcast customer service to this blog post. I’ll keep the blog updated with any additional responses from Comcast.

I returned my Comcast box today and missed the local office manager who it seems is the only one who can make the decision at the local office. I was hoping to fix my bill then. I left a message for her and let’s see if I hear back from her again.

Post orignally made on Dec. 9:

Today I got a shocker bill from Comcast. $198 and change. My usual bill is $37 and change, where the change part fluctuates each month.

They retroactively changed my November bill from the 37.xx to 90 something. The claim made by comcast customer service is that my promotional period ended in the middle of the month and their systems can’t handle that kind of change until the day of the change itself so they just add it in to my next bill. I told the CS lady that if I would have known that my bill would go from 37 to nearly 100, I would just cut cable and that Comcast deceived me by sending me a small bill in Nov and then retroactively charging me more in Dec. for the Nov. period. The lady even told me that since I already used the service I must pay whatever they say I must pay.

The supposed promotion that I was on was for 29.99/month plus tax but the rates kept going up by a few cents to a few dollars each month. The lady asked if I knew I was on a promotional rate, which I was so I said yes. But I told her I had no plans of continuing with all the stuff I had beyond the promotion and had I known a.k.a got a correct bill in Nov I would have cancelled or modified service.

But the rep. just got annoyed with me and I was getting inreasingly frustrated trying to explain to her that the whole problem in this situation is that November is done and gone and I’m not paying more than the original November bill, which is my usual Comcast bill. Anyway she refused to modify anything in the bill and refused to forward to a supervisor (saying she was the most senior person there) and promised that a supervisor will call me in 48 hours. In the meanwhile, while this was going on without even informing or confirming with me she cut my cable.

Parchayi noticed the clock on the cable go off and I asked the CS lady if she cut my cable. She said yes and that I had said I wanted to cut my cable (which I clearly told her I wanted to do when the next billing cycle starts after she fixes my November bill). At this point I was maybe 20 minutes into arguing with her and I just gave up on her and on Comcast.

Until I get DISH (another post altogether), I’ll find out how it is to live without TV for a few days!

As you must know from my previous post about no longer having or wanting Comcast, I’m trying to get DISH.

But since I had DISH a couple of years ago, it seems that DISH network will not sell me DISH service again. I called DISH a couple of times and was given the same information by both reps. The first one flatly refused to give me DISH unless I bought all the equipment and paid for installation or installed myself. The second one said that I needed to contact a retailer to get DISH and gave me a few numbers.

So I called a retailer (VMC) this morning (because none of the 24/7 retailers pick up the phone at night), who after charging me $10 for a credit check (DISH won’t sell you satellite TV without a credit check!!) tells me that I can’t be setup as a new customer because I already had DISH before and gave me a number to the DISH fraud line to get my old account deleted.

While being on hold for about half an hour with the DISH fraud line, I was getting frustrated enough to actually hang up and get DirecTV, but they don’t offer the same Hindi programming that DISH does so it has to be DISH. Anyway the Fraud alert guy put some note on the account asking the retailer to call him. He was apologetic and said that this whole thing was for my protection (my ass). He indirectly hinted that I originally had DISH through Embarq and the problem was because how the account was closed. Now I don’t remember if I posted about this or not, but never never ever get DISH through Embarq – they will send you wrong bills, not correct them in time, send you incorrect late fees and in general make your life a misery. Do not bundle Embarq + DISH. It doesn’t cost less and increases your problems.

Ofcourse I never got a call back from VMC so I called back and talked to someone else, who continued the process. She called DISH (another 10 minute hold) and they required her to call back and have both people on the line at the same time. So she called again with me on the line, got forwarded once wihtout the support even caring about what she had to say, one more 15 minute hold. Still no resolution to the problem so the VMC lady (also probably frustrated at this point with DISH) said she’ll get someone from DISH on the line first and then call me back. At this time I’m pissed enough to just live without TV but we have parents visiting soon and they’ll need TV. Once the DISH contract is over I’m seriously considering getting rid of everything and just living with Blockbuster online and Internet.

Anyway she called me back in 10 minutes and gave me the DISH fraud number again to get setup. So if you already had DISH in your life ever and are switching back, don’t call DISH, don’t call a retailer, just call 1-888-237-4278. I called again, got someone else and she went to find the first guy who put the note on my account (= more hold time) and I was asked to call the retailer again because DISH installation schedules would be much slower than the resellers. Anyway this time I accidentally called allsat instead of VMC and I just told the allsat lady that I already went through everything before and I just need her to call 1-888-237-4278 and have them on the line the same time as me and it was all done in about 15 minutes.

If you are a new customer considering DISH, just skip calling DISH and just call a retailer. Here are a few options:
VMC (10$ fee)
Dish Pronto (15$ fee, don’t get lured by their free offerings – they are not worth the effort)
Allsat ($0 fee)

Sidd’s Tip:If you read between the lines here, you will see that you can skip the credit check part if you call up a reseller and tell them you already went through the process once. Allsat only wanted the last 4 of my social because the lady thought I went through that whole process with them before. Well, VMC lost some commission from DISH. Anyway I’m an Allsat affiliate and I’m hoping that I get the commission for this order. That would make the wasted hours sort of worthwhile.

I drove back from DC to Charlottesville yesterday and gas prices at most of the pumps on 29 was between $2.999 and $3.099. As soon as you enter Charlottesville, prices are above $3.369. Why the nearly 40c difference within a few miles? Anybody with ideas on where to report this gouging please contact me. This was even reported on the news, but gas stations seem to be shamelessly unaffected.

Brown Honda of Charlottesville, I will never buy a car from you thanks to your shitty automated spam. I own a Nissan bought at Colonial and I’ve been to them several times and even they don’t phone spam me. I go to Brown Honda once for a state inspection and I have to deal with your stupid automated phone calls at work. I will never get anything done from you again and I will never buy a car from you.

You all know what I think of Indian Restaurants in Charlottesville but since Milan has a new chef from when we last visited, we thought we’d give the place another try and to summarize the experience – nothing has changed.

We went for the lunch buffet on a saturday. Only one dish amongst all the vegetarian food stood out – an eggplant dish, which too I would call good – nothing exceptional. The rest were mediocre curries. Even Chana (chick peas), which is really hard to get wrong was just ok. I can’t say about the chicken, but Parchayi definitely is not visiting the place again for a long time.

All in all, I’d say stick with Just Curry, which now has two locations, in place of Mesob at the Corner and on The Downtown mall.

I heard a few days back that Casella’s at Barracks Rd is being replaced by a new Thai place. Will report on that when it opens. My favorites still are Lemongrass and Thai 99. I’ve tried several times to try to get the chef at Lemongrass to tell us what goes in his Spicy Lemongrass Tofu, but he is tight lipped about it and the only clues he will give us is that it is a Thai-Vietnamese combination dish which has an Indian influence. I’m willing to offer a free 20$ gift certificate or 20$ by paypal if you can reverse engineer that dish for us.

Indian restaurant owners in cville, if you are not prepared for some embarrassment, stop reading.

Just to be fair, All this applies only to the buffet’s at Indian restaurants. I’ve not tried ordering off the menu at any and don’t plan to unless I get some nice coupons.

Let me start with some history. Of the Indian restaurants that existed when I moved to cville, only Maharaja is still standing and the food at Maharaja was mediocre at best. After a while, Milan opened and the food there was also mediocre but most liked it more probably because it was slightly different from Maharaja. Later Maharaja’s chef took over Maharaja but I’ve not been to it after then because I wasn’t too pleased with the food anyway. Milan’s chef left Milan and started a new place called Royal Indian just north of Target and I tried the buffet there. All the food was mostly tasteless pasty creamy goo so I will not recommend it at all. I’ve not tried Milan’s new chef but I’ve heard reports the the food has not changed at all.

So considering this, where do you get the best Indian food in Charlottesville? The answer is Just Curry at the corner. They are Carribean style curries but that’s just nice Indian food. There are not many options to select from but the food is really tasty, unlike the bland pastes at lunch buffets at the Indian restaurants.

I actually asked the chef at Royal Indian why the food was so bland and his reply was that it is for the American palette. If that’s the case, I wonder, why is it that Just Curry is full of Americans and Royal Indian is always empty? Indian restaurants, please give us some decent spicy food! Give us some Indian Chinese and stop making us drive to DC for the good stuff.

Saturday, we drove down 29S to Colleen to eat at Thai-Siam (the much praised Thai takeout place south of Lovingston) and the food was good – similar to Thai 99 but with some dishes not available at Thai 99. The place is mostly a takeout joint and the food is probably like Thai home cooking.

Yesterday, we ate at Mamma-Mia! – the Italian place at the corner of Preston and Grady. We eaten there often and I can say that they have amongst the best Italian food in Charlottesville. It’s a great quiet place to eat because it is genrally never crowded (a shame since the food is so good).

We switched from Dish+DSL to Cable in June because of their irresistible offer – 29.99 for Cable (Digital Basic + HBO + Max) for a whole year and 19.99 for Internet for six months. However since the day we switched we have had nothing but trouble.

On the day of installation, our signal was terrible. It turned out that the wire leading to our house was bad. So they replaced that quickly in a week and voila, everything was clear and we were happy for a day. After which it was all downhill again. We get serious noise on analog channels starting from the 50s. All the digital channels face serious pixellation and sound skipping atleast once a minute. Somebody was supposed to show up yesterday to fix the problem and that never happened. I called them several times after their two hour interval was over and was assured several times that the person is running late and will give me a call with his ETA. No such luck. No person and no call to even inform us or reschedule.

To top all this trouble, as soon as I setup automatic payments the promotion disappeared (?) and my bill went up from 54 including tax to 89.85 including tax and a 25$ credit that they gave me for the trouble, which makes a grand total of 114.85!!!!

I called comcast to fix this and the person had no clue why the bill was what it was. She could not figure any of the charges on the bill and wasted half an hour of mine until I just hung up in frustration (I couldn’t shout while I was at work). I was given bogus stories such as “Sir you got cable in Jun but High speed Internet in August”. What the hell have I been paying for from Jun until August then? I have since sent out an email to customer service and hopefully someone will fix things soon. If not, bye bye Cable.

Update: Comcast had automatically changed the time the tech visited to today without informing me! I got a reply from the email I sent comcast and it told me to chat with Customer Service. It turns out that the person I talked to on the phone had atleast reduced my bill some and the chat person reduced my bill back to what it should be. Now if only their tech can fix our channels. P.S. None of this affects the bill shown on the website and on the website there is no way to tell how much you owe!

Update: As usual, nobody showed up again and after a lot of screaming and complaining, I got another 25$ credit and somebody is scheduled to come in another week from now!!! If you are considering switching to Comcast in Charlottesville, think again. I wish the city would allow some competition for Comcast. When we had Dish, we could get no local channels thanks to trees blocking the view of their satellite.