China Palace Restaurant has some competition. One of dozens of Asian restaurants along Barber Lane, China Palace, with its ten tiny tables, floats like a minnow under the behemoth ABC Seafood Restaurant in the Ulferts Center. What it lacks in square footage, however, it compensates for in menu length, a sort of Napoleon complex, restaurant style. While it’s nice to have options, those in working for dot coms know that options are sometimes illusory wealth. And so at China Palace, some dishes hit pay dirt, others don’t. Happily, for the most part, you’re in the money.
Lunch specials are extremely well priced ($4.99, tax included) and loaded with goodies. You choose your main entrée, and China Palace combines it with rice, green vegetables, a smattering of "meat sauce" (ground pork in a soy based gravy), a tea egg, and a wedge of braised tofu. Among your choices are Smoked Duck, Chicken Steak, and Unagi. Fried Chicken Steak came crispy and pounded thin. Pork Chop is also hammered out for a quicker fry time that doesn’t dry out the meat.
Noodle and rice dishes are also popular among the lunch bunch. The extensive line up of noodle dishes are mostly variations on a theme. There are twenty or so iterations of Noodle Soup; with barbecued beef, simmered hog foot, soy sauce chicken leg, or lamb and pickled cabbage ($5 - 5.50). There are also twenty something varieties of Fried Rice. Shrimp Fried Rice is dependable, but for a dollar more, choose Shrimp Fried Rice Wrapped with Lotus Leaf ($6.50). This is rice that has been fried with egg and both dried and fresh shrimp, and then wrapped in a lotus leaf like a bundle of laundry and steamed. The lotus leaf imparts a smoky tea-like flavor.
Beef Chow Fun in Black Bean Sauce suffers from too many green peppers ($5.50). Clumped up noodles prevents the sauce from permeating the spongy layers of the fun.
Tossed noodles are thread-thin egg noodles, so called because of the method of combining the noodles with the sauce at the end of the preparation of the dish, rather than stir frying them along with the rest of the ingredients. The beef in Brisket Tossed Noodles was fatty but tender ($5.00). Bok choy in this dish was overdone.
Peeled Chestnut and Chicken Clay Pot, where whole chestnuts, black mushrooms and ginger make for a rich, complex broth ($6.50). This dish is not child-friendly, however. Chopped chicken bones leave shards which take some work to extricate.
At China Palace, while some dishes could use retooling, ample selection and affable service should be enough to keep you content until then.