Jade Inn Chinese Food

Jade Inn Chinese Food
535 Osborne St
204-474-2397
www.jadeinnchinesefood.com

April, 2022

This modest pick-up/delivery only provider shares a plain storefront with a pizza maker on Osborne.  They offer free delivery on orders of $35 within 5 km, free chicken fried rice with
orders of $35 or more, and free mixed vegetables with food orders of $40 or more (pretty much standard offerings for most Chinese restaurants).  Jade Inn offers in-house delivery if you call directly; they also use Skip the Dishes for online orders.  I highly recommend you DO NOT USE Skip the Dishes.  Those bloodsuckers take 30% off the top of the bill and often, they charge you for a delivery in addition to the 30% they took from the restaurant.  It's highly unfair that they take 30% when all they do is drive the food to you, leaving the restaurant only 70% to buy the ingredients, make and package your order, pay their staff, and try to earn a living.  In an economy where small businesses suffer, they can hardly afford to give almost a third of their profits to the this transnational corporation raking in $millions.  Just call them--the phone number is listed above.

To start, the free chicken fried rice comes with very small slivers of chicken as the only ingredient.  The rice tastes flavourful enough, although obviously, some vegetables would boost the spectrum of taste.  I suspect a lot of the flavouring comes from our friend MSG.  MSG has taken a lot of criticism because of its sodium content.  Yes, if you're on a low sodium diet, you should try to avoid MSG as much as possible, but if you're healthy, there's no difference between MSG and salt in terms of effects to your health.  In moderate amounts, it adds umami and depth to your foods.  However, it evokes the same thirst as if eating too much salt and my reach for a full litre of hydration after my meal testifies to the amount of sodium in these dishes.

The main difference between the free rice and the ordered rice, is that the for-pay rice comes with bean sprouts.  Bean sprouts is a perfect vegetable to add to most dishes.  It's quite neutral in taste so it does not affect the overall taste profile.  It adds moisture and most importantly, it adds texture and crunch to the bite.  In addition to the bean sprouts, the Jade Inn Special Fried Rice comes with chicken, shrimp and barbecued pork.  The chicken strips are the same that comes with the free rice, and the barbecued pork also comes in match-sized strips of meat.  Because the meats are cut so thinly, many of them get overcooked and hard to the bite.  Jade uses nice size shrimp but they're cut to pieces so that in total, this dish likely only has one shrimp, sliced.  

You can obviously see the pieces of shrimps, cut from the whole animal.  What you can also see is the grease spread on the plate from the rice.  Fat = flavour and the oil here provides nice flavour to the rice.  I should also add as a warning that if you're on a lower-calorie diet, some of these selections are probably not for you.

The photo on Jade's website shows the Jade Inn Special Chow Mein and the dish looks loaded with huge chunks of meat and vegetables.  Looking at my special fried rice dish, I immediately thought that Jade pulled the bait-and-switch trick where they advertise big shrimps and big pieces of meat, then when you order, you get slivers.  

(photo credit to Jade Inn)

Surprise!  When I open the container of Special Chow Mein, the shrimps are massive (large anyway) and the slices of meat are considerable.  That leads to the obvious question:  why would they use substantial ingredients for the special chow mein dish, but not the special fried rice dish?  What's the difference?  I don't get it--I really don't.  

True to the website photo, the actual dish provides big slices of chicken, equally substantial slices of barbecued pork, and considerable-sized tails of shrimps.  At first, I thought you only get one shrimp, but digging deeper into the dish, there are four, completely adequate for a dish this size.  Cooked nicely, the shrimps crunch on bite and do not have the overcooked seafood rubber taste.  They also cooked the chicken slices well, retaining its moisture.  The chicken pieces tastes a bit bland, needing some seasoning or saucing before hitting the wok.  The barbecued pork pieces have the nice hoisin flavouring but they're a bit overcooked, which is common in Chinese stirfries.  The Chinese precook the barbecue pork by roasting it.  It's then sliced after cooking and re-cooked when it goes into the stirfry.  As well, barbecued pork traditionally uses pork tenderloin, one of the leanest and easiest to dry-out cuts.  

The cauliflower and the broccoli are also overcooked, and mushy to the bite.  The carrots have more resistance so they remain crunchy.  Pieces of bok choy are cooked well, still crispy on the ribs and soft on the leaves.

This entire dish tastes more like a lo mein, rather than a chow mein.  "Lo" in Chinese means to blend together, such as you would with Italian pasta to its sauces.  "Chow" in Chinese means "to fry," meaning that noodles should have been fried on their own to give some crunchiness, before going into the sauce to blend.  Many restaurants now cheat and use pre-fried noodles from a package, where you blend at home on your own.  Those noodles are awful so if a restaurant gives you the choice between crunchy and soft noodles, never pick crunchy.  They're little better than the $0.50 packages of ramen noodles.

By contrast, the Ho Fun (or Chow Fun) noodles come al dente, with a wonderful bite to the velvety soft noodles. The nice-sized beef strips also taste velvety to the palate but the meat itself has a tough texture.  That indicates a tougher (cheaper) cut of meat and should have seen some marinade before cooking.  Bean sprouts is one of my favourite vegetables to add.  Not only does it instantly make any dish more moist, it adds a wonderful crunch to each bit.  Because bean sprouts are completely neutral in taste, they easily take on and relay the taste of the sauce.  This dish has a wonderful amount of bean sprouts to do exactly as they're supposed to in augmenting the plate.  

The overall dish tastes a tad bland--some more soy or oyster sauce would go a long way to adding depth to the Ho Fun.

The bean sprouts do an equally find job enhancing the Egg Foo Young, but sadly, that's one of the few highlights of this presentation.  The eggs are way overcooked, leaving them as a plasticky slop.  There are bits that fall off the main mass that show a hint of the softness that usually accompanies foo young.  Sadly, we don't see the big pieces of chicken that showed themselves in the chow mein.  The chicken pieces here are so small, I might easily mistaken them to be the mash from ground chicken meat.  

As you can see from the photo, the normally, bright yellow colour of foo young is gone--replaced by the deep brown on soy sauce.  As expected, the dish tastes like it has too much soy and the accompanying saltiness.  

Sadly, the pieces of chicken whtin the Sesame Chicken strips are not much larger than what was in the Chicken Egg Foo Young dish.  If you look at the photo, the strips seem substantial.

However, when you bite into the strip, you find it's all breading with just a sliver of chicken.  The breading makes up most of this dish and the abundance of sauce makes up the rest.  Too much sauce means that the strips have a sickly sweet taste, accompanied by the bite of too much salt.  

It's a hit-and-miss game with the food from the Jade Inn.  The dishes that hit, really hit the target and tastes wonderful.  The dishes that miss, completely miss the dart board and stick into the wall behind the target.  

For along time, I've been saying that the best Chinese comes from restaurants in Fort Garry, along the south corridor of Pembina Highway.  That's where the new generation of Chinese settled, being close to the University of Manitoba.  That's where the standards of Chinese food is elevated to meet a more-demanding and knowledgeable clientele.  We have some winners from Jade Inn but at least half the dishes were would not make it to the table in south Fort Garry, or New Chinatown.  

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Ray Yuen, Pit Master / Grill Master
Certified Kansas City Barbecue Society Judge – Badge #97736
Certified Steak Cook-off Association Judge – Badge #7788
Canadian Barbecue Society Member