I've never gotten sick there.

Talking to Guatemalans about restaurant recommendations, it becomes apparent that foreigners are not the only ones who suffer problems from the food and water here. Foreigners are definitely more likely to get ill from those things, and I think part of that is habituation to the microbes and part of that is poor choices in where we eat. We're not as practiced in scoping out a place before choosing it if it's unknown, and it seems a lot of folks that I've spoken to here only eat street food that's been recommended to them by someone else. I have a date to go with Lucky to a get chuchitos from a lady in the Parque Benito Juarez sometime this week. But every time a Guatemalan recommends a restaurant to me, they're like 'The food is delicious and I've never gotten sick eating there. Not once!' Although I can think of occasions when friends of mine got sick from a restaurant (Hannah, Zona Rosa, Telegraph Ave), it's not a must-mention when suggesting a restaurant. So yesterday Lucky and I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant here in Xela called Woon Kooc. I had invited her, my treat, since she'd gone to such pains the week before when making me lunch (getting a pie and cookies, for example, just so I could try the muy ricas polvorosas, meaning 'crumblies', as in that's the way the cookie... ), and then she'd taken such good care of me during my dental crisis. The day before, Saturday, in the latest search for cash, I ended up at the shopping center that has País, the supermarket now owned by Wal-Mart. I was picking up a thing or two while there (aside: if you were here, you'd shop there too), when the man in line behind me started laying huge bags full of broccolli on the conveyor belt. More than a household would eat, even if a recent super-foods convert. So I looked at the gentleman, who has an asian appearance, and then when the cashier entered the broccoli buyer's NIT (numero de indentificación tributaria, it's like a tax number for a business and they enter it when you check out if you have one) the name Woon Kooc came up! These are the kinds of things I linger around to find out about, though I didn't realize that the name would come up. I told Lucky about that when we sat down at the table on Sunday, and she nodded her head sagely and said 'So we know we will be eating healtfully today,' as she has great faith in País and Hiper-País. As an aside, when she and I had gone to Hiper-País the weekend before, we talked about the Wal-Mart take over, which was like 4 months ago, and she said that it was a great thing because before the workers had been paid terribly and they had to work long hours without compensation and now things were better. She was surprised when I told her that that was the reputation Wal-Mart has in the US. I felt like kind of a party-pooper telling her that. So even though foreign food except for maybe Italian doesn't enjoy much popularity here, the Chinese restaurant was bumping and it was pretty much all Guatemalan family groups. The food was good, not notably different from what you'd get at a Chinese restaurant in the US, and just to bring it home I'll mention we had broccoli beef in oyster sauce. The only thing that at first seemed odd to me was that many tables had large pitchers of white beverage on their table. I asked Lucky if they were pitchers of milk, but she said they were pitchers of horchata. A lot of tables had these pitchers, so I'm not sure if horchata is thought to go particularly well with Chinese food, maybe they make a particularly good horchata there (it did look good), maybe I'd just never seen a restaurant so stuffed with Guatemalan families on a Sunday... At any rate, it's been over 24 hours since my lunch there, and I can say Woon Kooc has done it again, it was delicious and I didn't get sick.