Welcome to JadeDinners!

By John Keenan 2001 Omaha World-Herald

At first glance, there is little to distinguish the Jade Palace from many other family-run Chinese restaurants that call the metro area home.

The restaurant is small, with a nice dinning area and comfortable booths. Its walls are hung with Asian art, and a loudspeaker plays muted eastern music.

The menu is primarily staples - egg roll, fried won ton, sweet and sour pork and various dishes representative of Mandarin, Hunan or Szechuan cuisine.

But the menu also has a small section of Malaysian cuisine, and that's how the Jade Palace separates and distinguishes itself.

The Malaysian dishes are from family recipes of owners Steve and Shirley Yau and differ from the Chinese dishes, according to a menu blurb, "by the careful use of spices from the East to enhance the flavor of each dish."

The menu offers a choice of chicken, pork, beef or shrimp, or a combination, with a selection of curries - yellow, red, green, Masaman and Penang curries - and lemak, which Yau said is not precisely a curry but similar.

The curries all feature coconut milk, with lemon grass, bamboo shoots, pineapple, green peppers and onions in varying degrees. See Jade Palace: Page 2

Jade Palace: Cuisine stands out

Continued from Page 1 We opened the meal with fried dumplings and fried prawns. The dumplings ($4.25 for a plate of six) came with the hottest ginger sauce I'd ever tasted, with tons of green onions bobbing in the brown broth. Spice lover that I am, the ginger sauce at Jade Palace proved too much for me - I had to go to the soy sauce on the table to flavor the dumplings.

The prawns ($3.95 for four, although we somehow got five) are breaded, fried and served hot, with the prawns chewy and juicy.

I also tried a cup of the Jade Palace's hot and sour soup ($1.25). The soup was served almost immediately after ordering, and it was hot but not too spicy, with plenty of thin-sliced bamboo shoots.

From the Malaysian section, my wife ordered a combination dish with lemak.

She could not stop raving about the lemak, a bright-yellow Malaysian dish containing coconut milk, lemon grass, pineapple and bamboo shoots. In fact, the smell of Asian spice from the box of leftovers had permeated our refrigerator overnight, and when my wife went to get milk the next morning, she nearly opted for the lemak over her standard bowl of Toasted Oatmeal Squares.

What gives the dish such allure is the balance of sweetness and hot, flavorful spices, cumin prevalent. The addition of tender shrimp, lean beef and strips of white-meat chicken created a filling dish.

Jade Palace's traditional Chinese cuisine is very good, as well. Portions are large, and basic dishes such as beef lo mein ($6.25) are served with tender, seasoned beef, as well as cabbage and carrots.

My General's chicken ($7.95) arrived with a side of fried rice on a plate that also boasted a turnip, sliced thin and arranged to look like a rose atop a bed of shredded cabbage.

The chicken was breaded and fried and drenched in spicy sauce, with two or three chili peppers tossed in for good measure. General's chicken, also known as General Tso's chicken, is a spicy chili-garlic dish that was created, according to legend, by Chinese military man General Zou Zong-Tang, who was looking for an easy-to-prepare dish for his troops to cook on the march. There are many versions of the dish - and many alternate spellings of the general's name. The Jade Palace version is quite deliciously tangy.

There were no desserts on the menu, but we did get fortune cookies with our check. The waiters were very friendly to the children, giving them extra fortune cookies with the meal.

The total for the ticket was $40.15, $48.15 with tip.

Jade Palace is a solid Chinese restaurant, and Yau's Malaysian concoctions give it an added touch of originality that will prove attractive to discriminating diners.