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RESTAURANT REVIEW: Apart From the Crowd

Amlee Gourmet stands out from usual Chinese restaurants

Your average neighborhood Chinese restaurant: red and black lacquer and paper lanterns.

Amlee Gourmet: blue, pink and orange neon.

OK, I'm taking some license here. (I'd call it poetic license, but I'm not a poet.) Red and black lacquer and paper lanterns actually have pretty much gone the way of good egg rolls; most average neighborhood Chinese restaurants these days have become impressively unimpressive in their decor. And I'm not sure the blue, pink and orange lighting that glows around the edges of Amlee Gourmet's recessed ceiling areas is really neon anyway. All I know is that it has lots of color and a steady glow.

But the comparison survives all of the qualifying of the preceding paragraph. In a reflection of the way that the neon (or whatever it is) adds a soft glow of color and helps the restaurant avoid the trap of predictability in a garden-variety storefront, Amlee Gourmet is a cut above.

Here's an example: White Creamy Shrimp ($13.95). Doesn't sound like much, does it? No description on the menu, but still we were curious. And our waitress, a lively sort with a here-let-me-help-you demeanor, was, of course, happy to explain.

Her description was accurate, as it turned out. White Creamy Shrimp was Firm White Shrimp coated in a wispy tempura batter, fried (and the grease but a memory), then topped with a light béchamel sauce and sprinkled with crushed peanuts. It was a combination of flavors (the sweet taste of the sea in the shrimp, the earthy taste of the land in the peanuts, the mildly flavored sauce as referee) and textures (firm, crispy, creamy, crunchy) that would tempt us to order it again and again.

Same thing with the glazed bananas ($6.50). Glazed (or fried, or honeyed, or whatever each place chooses to call them) bananas are hardly unusual in Chinese restaurants, where few other desserts really seem to go with the food. But these were different. Amlee Gourmet's servers use carts to bring the food to the table, which at once helps with all of those nagging ergonomic problems and also somehow lends a slightly genteel touch. For most courses, our waitress, using two serving spoons in a one-handed tong arrangement that only seasoned servers seem able to do (don't try this at home -- at least not with food) deftly transferred each course from the serving dishes onto the dinner plates. But in the case of the dessert, the cart meant we actually got to see her finish preparing the dish.

The bananas as they came from the table were fresh from the caramelized sugar used to glaze them. One at a time, our waitress took them and plunged them into a broad bowl holding a bath of ice water, which served both to solidify the sugar coating and cool them enough to be eaten. It was nice touch, and the bananas were perfect.

We'd started things off with a combination plate of appetizers ($14.50), which held a few surprises, good and bad. The good: Instead of barbecued ribs, which are messy to eat and don't hold much in the way of meat, we were served slices of barbecued pork, succulent and flavorful. The four fried shrimp on the platter were tempura-style, and perfect. The bad: The egg rolls were modern-Chinese-restaurant egg rolls, though somewhat better than most. And the shrimp puffs promised on the menu turned out to be akin to what a lot of places call Crab Rangoon, little beggars' purses fried crisp in won ton skins. We didn't detect any shrimp, but then we never detect any crab in the other places, either. These things ought to be called cream-cheese Rangoon or cream-cheese puffs or something. They're OK, you understand, but they're definitely not what's billed.

War Won Ton Soup ($4.50) was super, the bowl filled with tender pork-filled won ton, sliced pork and vegetables in a reasonably flavorful broth. And the Asparagus Chicken ($11.95) was OK, but kind of your basic Chinese Dish in Brown Sauce, however that would translate.

One knock on Amlee Gourmet is that the prices are higher than in many Chinese restaurants, and that's true for the most part (although they do have barbecued pork fried rice for $6.50 and chicken chow mein -- if you must -- for $7.50).

But Amlee's menu offers such a variety of well-executed dishes, we'll make it a point to return.

Besides, we want to figure out the nature of that lighting.

Las Vegas Review-Journal restaurant reviews are unannounced and done anonymously at Review-Journal expense.

Amlee Gourmet has an open, streamlined interior, accented by glowing blue, orange and pink at ceiling level.
Photo by Ralph Fountain.