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| - I have to say I'm rather disappointed after my half hour + trek to Chandler only to be served cold Chinese food in a cavernous (and empty) retail location. I'd read all the rave reviews about Jade Red Chicken and was amped for some kick ass grub. Three different people I know personally all told me I needed to check out CB as well and one of my buds, whose culinary curiosity is on par with mine, says he literally craves this stuff.
I was pretty stoked to try something new tonite for dinner as we tend to get bogged down in central phoenix and eat at the same places over & over again. It's Friday nite, I'd had a few beers after work and had a pretty light lunch, so I was beyond peckish and downright ready for the taste sensation I expected Chino Bandido to be. My better half and I drove from CenPho down to the culturally devoid center of the Universe (aka Chandler), hungry and excited. We'd read the reviews, used the interactive menu tool on the CB website and we were pumped for an excellent, if not quirky dinging experience. Not. ;(
The restaurant itself is in a bizarre, gravelly strip mall, oddly wedged between a nail salon and a store called simply "Wide Shoes". We walked in to what felt like a vacant student union during spring break - -when everyone else is in Ft. Lauderdale, Rocky Point or the Caribbean and you're the only kid broke enough to stay on campus and work at your library job. There were maybe 25-30 other diners in the place but it is so huge inside that it felt empty and barren.
We were greeted by a nice-enough counter lady who took our orders and punched them into the register. I felt somewhat robbed of the paper-menu ordering experience I'd heard so much about -- no challenge, nothing unique. We grabbed our drinks, utensils and straws and settled in at the end of a LOOOONG vacant Rubbermaid folding table. Jason asked why they had church buffet tables set up. I thought maybe there was something cool about them....but nope...just cheap tables. We looked around a bit while we waited for our food to come over and raised our eyebrows questioningly at one another. I kept waiting to "get it" -- which I figured we would when the food arrived.
There were some screaming kids running around while their parents ignored them, chatted with one another and texted. (BRATS! BRATS!! BRATS!!! Get outta my yard!! ...I yelled inside my head like that mean old lady from down the block when I was a kid).
My annoyance with bad parenting aside --I couldn't figure out why everyone loved this place. It has all the ambiance of a med-clinic. I felt like at any minute a middle-aged woman in chili-pepper-embellished scrubs would shuffle over, hand me a clipboard with a flower-shaped pen, ask me to sign a release form and pay my co-pay. There wasn't even MUZAK playing -- there was NO music playing which made the place seem even more devoid of life.
The food soon arrived and we dug in eagerly. Everything was a smidge above room temp -- if that, and pretty boring to be frank. The Jade Red Chicken is pretty comparable to Panda Express' orange chicken. The BBQ'd pork didn't seem to have any asian BBQ flavor -- more like roasted pork soaked in sugar and the cold, thick refried beans could have come from Taco Bell or a can. Nothing unordinary or even interesting here. The only thing that was in the least bit interesting was the pork fried rice which tasted oddly like it'd been cooked with cheap white sherry and shallots -- which I've not experienced before with fried rice. That was "atypical" but certainly not interesting or enchanting. The only redeeming thing about the meal was the Snickerdoodle which seemed oddly out of place for either Mexican or Asian food. It was pretty good though.
Even though I was physically full after the meal I felt very emotionally empty, oddly depressed about Chandler, its environs and its residents. Everyone else in the joint seemed oddly devoid of emotion as -- certainloy not like people who go out to dinner on a Friday evening.
I'm thinking we should have aimed the car towards the original Chino Bandido in the Aves. I am a fan of asian and latin foods and admittedly have an odd penchant for cheap asian buffets -- so I'm usually pretty tolerant of cheap bad fried foods. I'm thinking that the original divey joint didn't translate well to Chandler, so I'm willing to give CB another try -- just never again in the east valley.
Please someone explain to me what I'm missing here.
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