Where not to go, or how to throw your cash away

Café Denj. That’s the way you should write it in English, that’s the way it’s pronounced in Farsi, but you’ll find that the owners of the place have written all across the menus: DENG. The place is located on Vesal Avenue, between Enghelab and Taleghani St.

Why did we go there in the first place? We wanted to see a movie in a theatre nearby but we had an hour before it began so we thought we’d find a place to sit around and maybe have something to eat while we are at it just to kill time. The closest place available was Denj. You can easily be fooled by the look of it on the outside but hold your horses. Once you get in you’ll realize that maybe except for the wooden chairs there’s nothing in there that gives you that old café feel. The interior decoration is sloppy and diverse, so much that even if you try your best you still can’t make out any sense of harmony. There’s a big fish tank near the counter which is pretty nice and alluring but I felt like I had walked into an aquarium not a café.

So I thought okay, let’s try not to be obsessed about looks and give the other things a try, maybe that will marginalize the look factor, but to my disappointment that didn’t quite work out either. We chose what we wanted and waited for someone to come take our order. To our surprise a little kid maybe about 12 years old or so approached us asking “what can I get you?” I think it was exactly then when I said to myself you gotta be kidding me. Anyway we told him what we wanted for the first time but he didn’t quite get it, so we told him again still no luck, the third time we pointed to the items we wanted on the menu. My friend ordered a Konica coffee (no it didn’t have anything to do with cameras) I a cappuccino and a chocolate cake, but they didn’t have chocolate cake, in fact out of the three kinds available on the menu they didn’t have any kind of cake at all.

We sat waiting only for a short while and to our surprise our order was ready almost instantly. Our waiter, the kid, brought our cups one by one, He managed to spill some of the Konica and the cappuccino cup was already dirty on the lower exterior edge. The cappuccino I can say was nothing but instant coffee mixed in lots of hot milk along with a little milk foam on top, we all know a cappuccino’s not a cappuccino without the foam right? The Konica was burnt and had a rancid taste swimming in it. They had taken the advantage to add sugar to both, and plenty of it too. I just can’t stand it when coffee is too sweet. While we were drinking we looked around and saw the manager sitting behind his desk speaking on the phone, smoking, with his feet crossed on top of the table, his souls facing our way. I can’t forget the look on my friends face when she saw this. Comparing the quality of what we ate with the prices we were charged I can confidently state that the place is way overpriced.

The only thing that I guess customers liked about the place was that unlike the well-managed popular cafés around town smoking wasn’t a problem here. With the experience I had today I am now sure that Denj is a place that I will probably never go to again.