Audio By Carbonatix
Shrimp with gralic sauce?”
“I love shrimp with gralic sauce. Get some of that.”
“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.
The beef, though, was undeniably fantastic — heavy on the
cuminum, with cyminum coming on only as a faint aftertaste, a ghostly
echo of sweet spice in the back of the throat, almost-but-not-quite
burnt away by the odd sparks of biting heat and heavy brown flavor of
wok-seared onion. Smothering our laughter at the Chinese kid with the
bowl cut and crazy eyes, bouncing in his seat and shrieking “I LOVE
PORK CHOPS! I LOVE PORK CHOPS!” at the top of his six-year-old lungs,
we ate in silence, stunned by how good China Jade could be when the
kitchen was working on its own home turf, in its comfort zone.
Where I return just a few days later. Again, I’m handed the yellow
take-away menu. Again, I smilingly ask for the real menu,
please. Credit where it’s due: I think China Jade would prefer to
operate with just one menu, and has only gone schizophrenic out of a
nervous fear that its American neighbors might not cotton to the
flavors of Szechuan eel or crispy pig intestines with cabbage. Because
whenever I’ve asked to order off the Chinese menu, I’ve been
given a copy with real pleasure, with a sense of something that’s
almost like relief. Sure, the lemon chicken might pay the bills, but
the boiled beef in stew? That’s what’s actually good. All the
people crowding the tables behind me — the families and children,
the couples, the Asian teenagers flipping through the magazines and
running their fingers over the pictures of starlets in miniskirts,
their faces garlanded in Chinese lettering like advertisements for
replaceable heads — are eating off this menu. They can read the
Chinese specials sketched out on paper and hung by the counter. They
know how to ask for the whole fishes, the casseroles full of stewed
vegetables and bits of chewy porcine digestive machinery. I make do
with the bad English translations (which are still better than I would
ever be able to do, translating “cheeseburger” or “tournedos of beef
Rossini” into Mandarin), some pointing and a lot of questions, all of
which are patiently answered.
I order the boiled beef (mostly because of the nod of the head when
I ask about it) and get something that seems almost Mexican —
thin strips of flank steak soaking in a murderously hot hell-broth of
chiles and Chinese peppers and lava and brimstone, tasting (in that
brief instant before the heat punches a hole in my sinuses) like an
adobo stew, all brick-red and earthy and incredibly delicious. The
twice-cooked pork is actually pork belly, sliced
prosciutto-thin, seared in the wok and slapped fast onto the grill,
then served with onions and mystery vegetables and sharp triangles of
something that looks like banana leaf. Meat bans? They’re steamed buns,
a half-dozen to an order, filled with a paste with a texture like
wonton filling and a flavor like cold terrine of foie, which makes me
think it’s from an organ meat of some variety and not caring a bit
which organ that might be.
There’s also Tianjin-style mooshu pork (finger food for me) and
Tianjin-style boneless duck, salted fish and shrimp tofu and a plate of
what appears to be bones in sauce, sitting on a bed of shredded pork
bits (stomach, I think) that smell like barbecued brisket. I want it
all. I want to start introducing myself to the tables that surround me
in hopes that other diners, driven by hospitality, will offer me a bite
of this, a piece of that.
I don’t do this, of course. There’s the language barrier, as well as
the fact that I’m walled in by an entire family’s worth of food myself.
But sitting here on a busy Sunday night, watching the tables turn,
tearing into meat buns and hellfire stew, I think back to that kid
— bouncing in his seat, wide-eyed and shouting out his love of
pork chops — and I suddenly understand the urge.
Before it becomes too overpowering, I take a huge bite of the boiled
beef and swallow without chewing, smiling through the springing tears,
reveling in the sweat, hardly thinking about pork chops at all.
