China Ginger an attractive restaurant with generous servings, but lacks authenticity

Especially considering its location in a strip mall in the 'burbs, China Ginger is a very attractive restaurant. The laminate tables are wood-grained, glass room dividers are etched with Asian designs, there's a very unusual (but very appealing) tiled-roof accent strip above the cozy booths, and a large mirrored wall makes the restaurant look more spacious than it actually is.

Service was good, too, with courses well-timed and a man and woman who both had a pleasant, proprietary air coming by regularly and trying to be helpful.

If only the food matched the atmosphere and service.

There wasn't really anything wrong with the food at China Ginger -- no raw foods that should have been cooked or burned food or anything like that. It's just that this is Chinese food for people who don't really like Chinese food. If the restaurants in Chinatown make you a little nervous, this is the place for you.

My first hint of that should have been the reaction when we ordered the scallion pancakes as an appetizer. This is a classic Chinese dish, but not one you'd likely find in the Chinese restaurants across the country in the '60s and '70s. It's a simple dish with a few basic ingredients and, when properly prepared, simply delicious. But when we ordered it, he said, "Oh, we don't have that. We need to take that off the menu."

Uh-oh.

He recommended the potstickers, and since nothing else on the list jumped out at us, potstickers ($5.75) it would be. They arrived quickly -- maybe a little too quickly. They also looked, and tasted, a little too manufactured, with no real character, distinction, or much in the way of flavor.

Coconut chicken ($10.95) sounded appealing, and its inclusion in the "chef's recommended" section of the menu indicated that it was a dish of which the kitchen was particularly proud. Absent a menu description, I had figured it would be on the order of the sweet-and-sour/lemon/almond style of chicken dish, which is to say it would be based on chunks of chicken that had been breaded and fried. I figured maybe they'd be dipped in coconut, too. Or something.

Instead, we were served a plate of very thin, very manufactured-looking chicken "planks." Now, they were actual chicken meat (not the parts-is-parts ground-and-reformed stuff), so that was a good thing, and they had been cooked just until the breading was crisp, but c'mon, guys. And they were blanketed in a thick white sauce with only extremely sporadic hints of coconut flavor, so that the overall impression was white, in flavor as well as color.

Ironically, the best dish of the lot was one I had considered boring and garden-variety, the beef asparagus ($9.95), a variation on the familiar beef with broccoli. It was indeed very similar to that menu classic, and the fact that the asparagus was both in ample supply and nicely crisp-tender added to the appeal of the dish.

Actually, all of the dishes -- including steamed rice -- were generously sized.

One thing that was telling was that chopsticks were nowhere on our table. That was the norm when I dined at Chinese restaurants as a kid, but after so many years of using them, the fork actually seemed awkward. But then again, I think it's a good guess that chopsticks aren't much in keeping with China Ginger's target audience.

Las Vegas Review-Journal restaurant reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or e-mail her at hrinella@ reviewjournal.com.