Shrimp with gralic sauce?"
"I love shrimp with gralic sauce. Get some of that."
Location Info
Details
China Jade
Triple Delight $10.95
Sour taste cabbage $7.95
Cuminum cyminum
beef $9.95
Meat bans $4.95
Boiled beef $9.25
12203 East Iliff Avenue, Aurora
303-755-8518
Hours: Lunch and dinner daily
"Sour taste cabbage? Or Triple Delight? What do you suppose that
is?" she asked, and smiled. I responded, mind soaking in the gutter,
and we giggled like kids hearing their first dirty joke.
"Oh, wait. What about this?"
She pointed and I followed her finger down, running across the slick
surface of the laminated menu to the cuminum cyminum flavored beef. It
took me a second, reading over the four words (eight words if you
counted the cuminum cyminum flavored lamb just below) and cocking my
head like a dog hearing a strange sound, a word other than its name. My
lips moved, trying to wrap around the strange, almost Latin clusters of
consonants and vowels, finally going phonetic.
Cumin...cinnamon...beef...? Cumin-cinnamon beef.
"Oh, yeah. We gotta order that."
And we did. Plus some shrimp in gralic sauce. Plus some wontons that
we'd thought were pork belly but weren't. We skipped the Triple
Delight, my darling wife and I. That, we figured, would keep until
after dinner.
We were at China Jade, a little space in a forgettable east
Aurora strip mall, surrounded by French bakeries, barbecue restaurants,
Eastern European groceries, nail salons, coffee shops and chain
operations. From the outside, China Jade isn't much to look at: covered
windows, student lunch specials written out on vivid construction
paper, a bright neon OPEN sign glowing optimistically. Inside, it's
small — big as a living room, maybe — with ten tables, a
register, a magazine rack pushed up against the wall, a Buddha here, a
maneki neko good luck cat there, and one of those backlit menus hanging
near the ceiling filled with pictures of kung pao chicken and
sweet-and-sour pork, all super-saturated with unnatural Day-glo colors.
Calling it intimate would make it sound too twee, too sparkling;
cozy too warm. It's simply small and close and crowded.
And possibly the best Chinese restaurant in Denver.
Not if you want very American Chinese food (and there's nothing
wrong with that), though, which is what you get if you order off the
bright yellow, four-fold to-go menu or that backlit board. The egg
rolls (thin ones, almost Vietnamese) taste like they've been frozen at
some point in their existence, maybe not so long ago. The lo mein is
bluntly dull and laced with threads of squash coming off the mandolin
that almost immediately go limp and slimy.
And not if you're looking for legendary Szechuan. China Jade's
Szechuan offerings are also listed on that to-go menu, and they're
decent Szechuan-lite. The kung pao beef even has an edge of excellence
— a layered, complex flavor with hot flakes of red pepper as the
searing top note and a low basement full of dusty, earthy savor. And
over steamed rice, on a white plate on a pale green table, the Szechuan
chicken and Singapore chow mei fun come off almost flirtatious, almost
deliberately manipulative, as though someone (that young dude with the
crazy pop-star hair, maybe — wrapped in gouts of steam, working a
wicked rhythm over his blazing wok) is holding back. Intentionally
dialing it down as a misguided favor to the somewhat
less-than-Occidental weirdo at the table by the wall, grinning around a
mouthful of snow peas like he knows what's what.
It took me a visit or two to figure out what, exactly, was what at
China Jade. I'd shoved a fair amount of lo mein and cock-tease kung pao
into my food hole before I caught on and understood the essential (and
either mildly racist or exceedingly polite, depending on how you look
at it) disconnect between the plain-jane plates of noodles and pea pods
on the yellow take-out menu and the completely other dishes that
kept coming out of the back in huge, steaming, family-size portions,
and going to those tables full of Asian customers with which China Jade
always seems so full: the pots and the casseroles, the platters of fish
and plates of goodies that smelled of alien herbs and foreign spice as
they were walked past me.
Turns out, China Jade has two menus: the take-out menu full of crab
rangoons, pu pu platters and chop suey, and a laminated menu stuffed
with strange juxtapositions (pork tofu?) and stranger delights (pig
stomach with cilantro), with the food that the kitchen (obviously)
wants to be cooking and the customers who know better want to be
eating. China Jade is two restaurants in one building, two spirits in
one body. Depending on who walks through the door, it's either a
run-of-the-mill, slightly better-than-average American Chinese
restaurant or one of the best Chinese Chinese restaurant in
town, serving a cuisine based mostly around Tianjin in northern
China.
From the Chinese Chinese menu, Laura and I got our shrimp
with gralic and our beef in misspelling sauce. We got our
not-quite-pork-belly wontons in red pepper oil. And with every single
dish, we got an apology: Sorry this took so long, sorry you had to
wait, sorry there is so much... We waved off these deprecations and
dug in. The shrimp was fairly standard, a dark-side take on an Italian
scampi, proof that no one anywhere is that different from anyone
anywhere else, at least not when it comes to appetite. The wontons were
contrary proof that maybe tastes really do differ, that people are as
different in appetite as they appear. They were actually omasum,
which is a particular kind of tripe and not from a pig at all, as I'd
assumed because when I asked about it, the guy I asked pointed at his
belly and said "stomach." But to me, they tasted just of the hot pepper
oil in which they lay.
