Jade Palace Restaurant

User rating

 

7.7 (21)

Great Chinese food. The best I've had in Paphos/Coral Bay. We had banquet B and added on a mixed starter. €47 (included duck) Great value, good service. Easy to find, drive through Coral Bay main strip past the beach and it's further up on your left.

China gave the world woven silk, fireworks, playing cards, pasta, fishing reels, whisky, poison gas, paper, wood block printing, lacquer, the compass and the wheelbarrow. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding callipers, porcelain, magic lanterns and the stink bomb (one recipe called for 15 pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles).

It is claimed that Chinese mathematicians invented the decimal point and developed the concept of zero. They introduced it to the Hindus who introduced it to the Arabs who in turn passed it on to Europe in a sort of inter-continental game of Chinese whispers (did they invent those too?).

I always admire inventions, especially those usually born of near catastrophic mistakes.

Penicillin is one of the more commonly known mistakes, creating the most widely prescribed antibiotic in the world but did you know that coca cola was originally invented as a medicinal cure for headaches or that the potato crisp was born out of anger by an American chef.

So mad that a disagreeing customer repeatedly returned his French fries for being too thick, prankster cum Chef George Crum set about slicing his potatoes so thin and cooking them to such a crisp that the demanding patron wouldn`t be able to use his fork in trying to eat them.

But the joke backfired, the awkward customer loved the chips so much that he ordered more and before you know it, there`s a $6 billion dollar industry and 10% of kids in the world are obese.

Who`s laughing now?

Chinese food has four distinct cooking styles. Cantonese, Szechuan, Peking, Shanghai.

Cantonese is the most popular regional Chinese cuisine throughout the world, mainly because most of the original emigrants were from the Canton region and the West quickly fell in love with dim sum and their subtle use of sauce and spicing in a variety of stir fries, roasts and seafood steams.

Szechuan has been gaining in popularity over recent years with restaurants characterised by their abundant use of feisty Indian spices and red hot chillies, flavours passed on by Buddhist missionaries and Silk route traders throughout the centuries.

Peking cookery not surprisingly involves duck and pancakes, more than its fair share of steamed dumplings and it`s the only part of China where wheat outranks rice as the main starch of choice.

And finely Shanghai encompasses the cooking from all local districts and is distinct for its liberal uses of rice wine vinegar, sugar and soy sauce. Cooking here tends to be much slower and meat is often braised in rich soy based stocks to give it flavour and deep ruby colouring.

This is just a brief overview of simple Chinese cooking, it can be broken down again and again into eight, nine, ten different styles of regional cooking but I waste a tree to highlight a point. With this much choice, this much heritage and this much tradition, why is it that inside every faux Chinese temple on every high street, every laughing Buddha greasy takeaway in Basildon and every year of the dog, duck, monkey and snake all-you-can-eat buffet around the world do you get the same uncle Ben`s black bean curd, any old iron plum varnish or Dyno-rod sweet & sour special sauce dishes.

Jade Palace on the frog and toad complex in Coral Bay is one such example. It`s taller than Trump towers, a full four floors of stir fried crab claws and at capacity it could probably seat more overweight, sunburnt day-trippers than a Barry Manilow concert at Caesars Palace.

We took the Hill`s and kids on a wet and windy Robbie Burns night, when luckily capacity was more Steve Brookstein on a P&O ferry to Portsmouth but the food was equally depressing.

From a set menu, chicken & sweet corn soup was so gelatinous it wobbled like a badly set jelly and contained enough salt to bring down a baby rhino. Every porcelain spoonful I knew would shorten my life expectancy but like a crack whore craving a hit I just couldn`t put it down, I didn`t care that it didn`t even taste like chicken or that the corn kernels were suspended mid soup like golden nuggets in a glue factory. I just needed more.

I now fully understood Harry the mosquito from a bug`s life when he`s flying towards the bug zapper and the other mosquito is pleading “Harry no - don`t look at the light” but entranced Harry just carries on “I-can`t-help-it. It`s-so-beautiful” ZAP ZZZZZZZZZZZ “Woo hoo”

Spring rolls ordered from the appetisers were a golden crisp, grease free and plump, full of shredded vegetables but spring rolls from the mixed appetisers within the set menu were small anaemic, lifeless pockets of dirty oil, runts of the spring roll litter, punishment for ordering set menus when there was a more expensive option available.

Everything else was ok, close your eyes and it all tasted the same. Beef in black beans with peppers, sweet & sour pork, special fried rice........the list goes on, a roll call of generic Westernised dishes. Comforting and familiar for many but far removed from their heritage and history.

Dragon carvings on the doors, carp swimming in ponds by the loos, somehow these symbols of Chinese stereotypes are supposed to recreate the spirit of a eating in Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong.

But the real spirit, the backbone, the very essence of Chinese food and culture is in its inventiveness, its individuality, its understanding and expression of ingredients and without it, the likes of Jade Palace are soulless, purveyors of ghosts, an illegitimate and perverted perception of Chinese chow.

I have eaten here a few times, this last time we gave the set menu a further going over, see the review below 'Chinese Meze'. It really offers excellant value for money. I did ask the waitress if I would be hungry and she said she didn't think so, I wasn't. A great selection of very tasty dishes with good sized portions, not the rip off at all that set dinners sometimes are.

The place must have cost a small fortune to bulid and furnish, quite decadent. The waitresses in their oriental inspired uniforms were both friendly and efficient.

I read somewhere below that there are a lot of good quality chinese restaurants in the area, that certainly has not been my experience over the last 10 years of paphos dining, certainly there are a lot of chinese eateries, but creating good tasty food, I can count them on 2 fingers and include Jades Palace as one of them, I am pretty sure the other has recently closed !

If you want a good UK quality (that is different to good Cyp quality) chinese give it a try, it could be said to be tending towards the expensive but certainly not if you have the set dinner.

All in all a very poor effort from The Jade Palace. Food was average (king prawn dish had 4 prawns for 13 EUR!) service was dreadful with clueless staff and the bill was expensive. There are too many good Chinese restaurants in Paphos to bother with this one. To top it all the staff completely ignored us as we left and I left a tip for no apparent reason (more fool me!Never again.

Well what a surprise! I'd not been here before but we went last night because someone had put a menu on my bf's car and it looked great.

Having braved the torrential rain we looked at the very comprehensive menu but decided to have the set menu which was an absolute triumph.

None of your two choices for each course - oh no we started with a selection of snacks (spring rolls, prawn toast, prawns, dips etc), then crispy duck and pancakes, then a veritable feast of main courses including crispy beef, sweet and sour chicken, king prawns in lemon, almond chicken, sizzling pork, duck in plum sauce, mixed noodles, special fried rice - I'm sure I've forgotten some but it was all absolutely delicious and perfectly cooked. Oh and there were crispy toffee bananas with ice cream too!

Service was brilliant and the owner came for a chat too. The only downside was the lack of other customers but we were early and it looked to be picking up as we were leaving.

The dining area is lovely and airy, heaters were very welcome last night, it's split into smoking/non smoking, and the toilets are upstairs.

The cost per person for ALL THAT FOOD is only €24 - totally amazing value wise, and with drinks our bill incl tip was €60.

I'm definitely going back!