Audio By Carbonatix
In this week’s Cafe review, I declared China Jade possibly
the best Chinese restaurant in the city. And when I told
a few of my fellow gastronauts what I was about to do, here’s what they
all wanted to know: Is it better than Chopsticks?
For the past few years, Chopsticks China Bistro has stood as the
ultimate avatar of that mutt-Asian, Chinese-American,
best-of-both-worlds impulse that seems to seize so many Chinese
restaurant operators when they open in the United States. They know (or
think they know) that Americans like their Chinese food one way, and
that their Chinese customers like it another way. Americans want wonton
soup and egg rolls, gummy sweet-and-sour pork and toothless lo meins
and everything served with chunks of white-meat chicken in melted down
SweeTart sauce. Chinese customers want eel and pig intestine and rice
porridge and jellyfish salad. The resulting restaurants operate like
high-functioning schizophrenics, doing one kind of cuisine for one
group of customers and something wholly other for the rest.
Chopsticks walks this tightrope, and so does China Jade.
And I honestly don’t know which one is better. Chopsticks’ menu is
longer by far, deeper and more inclusive; China Jade’s is short, tight
and (at least when you’re talking about the laminated menu made for the
Asian customers) doesn’t have a loser in the bunch. I can say with
confidence that Chopsticks, while widely known for its fantastic
versions of traditional Chinese peasant grub like pork shank and
flaming intestines and “three cup sauce frog with basil,” does the
American stuff better than China Jade — mostly because it imbues
even the simplest lo meins and lettuce wraps with sneaky bits of pure
Chinese technique. But I can also say that right now, China Jade (which
operates out of a strip mall in east Aurora and depends on the steady
flow of American customers to keep the doors open) seems to have a
better handle on my particular appetite for traditional Chinese
cooking.
But Chopsticks gets bonus points for one very good reason: It serves
sandwiches. Not American sandwiches, but distinctly Chinese ones made
of shredded meat in a variety of sauces, touched with cilantro or onion
or both, served with rice and all made for stuffing inside hollowed-out
rolls like some kind of Far East Hot Pocket. Because I am a man who
dearly loves a sandwich of any description, I dearly love the ones
served at Chopsticks.
But does that make Chopsticks better than China Jade? I’d hate to
have to choose — and fortunately, the Best of Denver 2010 is
still ten months away.
