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Rice Cafe

Chinese dishes get spruced up at Cupertino Restaurant

by Stett Holbrook on Aug 10, 2009
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WHEN IT comes to Chinese food, I tread carefully. Silicon Valley, like the rest of the planet, is awash in Chinese restaurants, but you have to wade through a lot of General Tso’s chicken and greasy fried rice to find the good stuff.

What’s the good stuff? For me, it’s food that doesn’t cater to America’s sweet and grease tooth. It’s food that skips Americanized dishes like the aforementioned General Tso’s chicken and mall food court standards, such as Chinese chicken salad and honey-walnut prawns, in favor of regional food. It’s food that comforts, surprises and satisfies.

So when I discovered Cupertino’s new Rice Cafe, I was skeptical. The 100-plus-item menu reads like a tour of the usual suspects of Chinese-American food. But I’m pleased to report that while many of the dishes are ordinary, the execution of said dishes surprised me with their refinement and light touch.

The hard-to-find restaurant occupies a space formerly held by Jade Tree Chinese Restaurant. The trick to locating it is entering the parking lot on the corner of Wolfe Road and Stevens Creek Boulevard and looking for the restaurant’s orange sherbet–colored façade. My dining companion’s iPhone steered him totally wrong. The restaurant is next to Kitsho Sushi and opposite the House of Falafel, if that helps.

Inside, the restaurant is an air-conditioned oasis of serenity. The brick-red walls are hung with framed works of art. Tables are covered with white linen tablecloths and topped with little wooden boxes that you slide open to reveal sets of chopsticks. The only odd touch is the looping soundtrack of ’70s pop-song piano instrumentals.

Chef Cheng Wei Zhang comes from the city of Shanhaiguan in northeast China, yet the restaurant’s cuisine is variously called “Chinese private cuisine” and “Taiwanese.” Chinese private cuisine is a hybrid of styles that came together in the private, aristocratic kitchens of imperial China. Rice Cafe says it simply means the food comes from Zhang’s personal (or private) recipes. Taiwanese food is similar to Chinese food, yet different. But don’t worry about the confusing nomenclature. Just eat.

You’ve no doubt had pot stickers 1,000 times, but here, the housemade fried dumplings ($5.95) are filled with ginger and green onion–flecked slow-braised beef and enough savory broth so that the chewy little packages burst in the mouth. They’re wonderful.

Less common is the Chinese cucumber salad ($6.95), a refreshing, onion-spiked blend of shredded cucumbers, bell peppers and cilantro awash in a spicy, sweetish dressing. For something really off the beaten path, look for the four-item Mandarin menu posted on the table. From the small list of appetizers (which the friendly waitresses in Hawaiian-print shirts will translate for you), I picked two winners: the chilled, sliced beef shank in red chile oil ($6.95) and the spicy bean curd noodles ($4.95).

But most dishes are more familiar and uncommonly good. The hot and sour soup ($6.95) has a lighter touch than most versions of the soup and tickles the back of the throat with white pepper heat. The dry-fried green beans ($7.95) are wok-withered, but snappy and fresh. It’s the dried garlic tossed with the vegetables that makes them so good.

Kung pao shrimp ($9.95) is a solid take on the classic, and I liked the mildly numbing effects of the Sichuan peppers in the mapo tofu ($7.95). Most versions of the spicy-saucy standard have ground pork on top, but this one is meat free.

For something unabashedly spicy and delicious, check out the beef with roasted chiles in clay pot ($8.95), a fearsome-looking pot of thinly sliced beef simmering in a deep and rich sauce studded with wok-tossed chiles and Sichuan peppers.

The one real clunker I encountered was the lemon chicken ($8.95), fried pieces of chicken entombed in a syrupy, sweet glaze. This is the kind of Chinese food I run from, but which is thankfully in short supply here.

Rice Cafe may be hard to find, but its familiar menu is easy to like.

Rice Cafe
Address: 10074 E. Estates Dr., Cupertino.
Phone: 408.996.2999.
Hours: 11am–2:30pm and 5–9pm Tue–Sun.
Cuisine: Chinese.
Prices: Entrees $7.95–$10.95.



by Stett Holbrook on Aug 10, 2009
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