Jade Palace, 24 Laxion, Coral Bay

China gave the world woven silk, fireworks, playing cards, pasta, fishing reels, whisky, poison gas, paper, wood block printing, lacquer, the compass and the wheelbarrow. They invented the umbrella, the seismograph, phosphorescent paint, the spinning wheel, sliding callipers, porcelain, magic lanterns and the stink bomb (one recipe called for 15 pounds of human shit, as well as arsenic, wolfsbane and cantharides beetles). 

It is claimed that Chinese mathematicians invented the decimal point and developed the concept of zero. They introduced it to the Hindus who introduced it to the Arabs who in turn passed it on to Europe in a sort of inter-continental game of Chinese whispers (did they invent those too?).

I always admire inventions, especially those usually born of near catastrophic mistakes.

Penicillin is one of the more commonly known mistakes, creating the most widely prescribed antibiotic in the world but did you know that coca cola was originally invented as a medicinal cure for headaches or that the potato crisp was born out of anger by an American chef.

So mad that a disagreeing customer repeatedly returned his French fries for being too thick, prankster cum Chef George Crum set about slicing his potatoes so thin and cooking them to such a crisp that the demanding patron wouldn’t be able to use his fork in trying to eat them.

But the joke backfired, the awkward customer loved the chips so much that he ordered more and before you know it, there’s a $6 billion dollar industry and 10% of kids in the world are obese.

Who’s laughing now?

Chinese food has four distinct cooking styles. Cantonese, Szechuan, Peking, Shanghai.

Cantonese is the most popular regional Chinese cuisine throughout the world, mainly because most of the original emigrants were from the Canton region and the West quickly fell in love with dim sum and their subtle use of sauce and spicing in a variety of stir fries, roasts and seafood steams.

Szechuan has been gaining in popularity over recent years with restaurants characterised by their abundant use of feisty Indian spices and red hot chillies, flavours passed on by Buddhist missionaries and Silk route traders throughout the centuries.

Peking cookery not surprisingly involves duck and pancakes, more than its fair share of steamed dumplings and it’s the only part of China where wheat outranks rice as the main starch of choice.

And finely Shanghai encompasses the cooking from all local districts and is distinct for its liberal uses of rice wine vinegar, sugar and soy sauce. Cooking here tends to be much slower and meat is often braised in rich soy based stocks to give it flavour and deep ruby colouring.

This is just a brief overview of simple Chinese cooking, it can be broken down again and again into eight, nine, ten different styles of regional cooking but I waste a tree to highlight a point. With this much choice, this much heritage and this much tradition, why is it that inside every faux Chinese temple on every high street, every laughing Buddha greasy takeaway in Basildon and every year of the dog, duck, monkey and snake all-you-can-eat buffet around the world do you get the same uncle Ben’s black bean curd, any old iron plum varnish or Dyno-rod sweet & sour special sauce dishes. 

Jade Palace on the frog and toad complex in Coral Bay is one such example. It’s taller than Trump towers, a full four floors of stir fried crab claws and at capacity it could probably seat more overweight, sunburnt day-trippers than a Barry Manilow concert at Caesars Palace.

We took the Hill’s and kids on a wet and windy Robbie Burns night, when luckily capacity was more Steve Brookstein on a P&O ferry to Portsmouth but the food was equally depressing.

From a set menu, chicken & sweet corn soup was so gelatinous it wobbled like a badly set jelly and contained enough salt to bring down a baby rhino. Every porcelain spoonful I knew would shorten my life expectancy but like a crack whore craving a hit I just couldn’t put it down, I didn’t care that it didn’t even taste like chicken or that the corn kernels were suspended mid soup like golden nuggets in a glue factory. I just needed more.

I now fully understood Harry the mosquito from a bug’s life when he’s flying towards the bug zapper and the other mosquito is pleading “Harry no - don’t look at the light” but entranced Harry just carries on “I-can’t-help-it. It’s-so-beautiful” ZAP ZZZZZZZZZZZ. “Woo hoo”

Spring rolls ordered from the appetisers were a golden crisp, grease free and plump, full of shredded vegetables but spring rolls from the mixed appetisers within the set menu were small anaemic, lifeless pockets of dirty oil, runts of the spring roll litter, punishment for ordering set menus when there was a more expensive option available.

Everything else was ok, close your eyes and it all tasted the same. Beef in black beans with peppers, sweet & sour pork, special fried rice........the list goes on, a roll call of generic Westernised dishes. Comforting and familiar for many but far removed from their heritage and history.

Dragon carvings on the doors, carp swimming in ponds by the loos, somehow these symbols of Chinese stereotypes are supposed to recreate the spirit of a eating in Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong.  But the real spirit, the backbone, the very essence of Chinese food and culture is in its inventiveness, its individuality, its understanding and expression of ingredients and without it, the likes of Jade Palace are soulless, purveyors of ghosts, an illegitimate and perverted perception of Chinese chow.

Ocean basket review

The Germans are famed for their reliability, that and their lack of humour and their early morning sun bed snatching, and their wall and their wars and their reliability. Did I mention reliability already?

Funny old thing is reliability. It’s like knowing what to expect is somehow...... well, naff. In the restaurant world a brand is the key word for reliability. Companies spend millions trying to create a brand, a place for yummy mummies and first time dates to impress. A place that will neither shock nor inspire, a place that will do exactly what it says on the tin, a sterile, pre-fabricated in Slough, middle class sperm bank that will both satisfy and create the board.

Antonio Carluccio is the man responsible for one of the most popular brands in recent times; his Neal Street restaurant in Covent Garden served everyone from Prince Charles to Mick Jagger. Both Jamie Oliver and Gennaldo Contaldo worked under Carluccio and the great man is often credited with popularising Italian food to a nation whose previous notions of pasta stopped with paving slabs of lasagne.

In 2005 with 23 restaurant serving over 60,000 meals per week, Carluccio and his then wife, Presilla Conran sold their share in his eponymous chain of restaurants for a reported £11 million, and with it a piece of his sole. As the brand grew, the resultant quality dropped and to the general public, the friendly faced, bushy browed, outsized Italian ambassador had sold himself down the river. The brand that bore his name was now bigger than the man himself.

As the corporate money machine steamrolled high streets up and down the country, Carluccio was powerless to stop it and in 2008 while slicing a loaf of bread after a lot of whisky he plunge a knife into his own chest. 

I’ve eaten at Carluccio’s, one of the new ones with Formica tables and a shiny red Vespa in reception and its bad, but not that bad. 

Ocean basket is a brand straight out of sub Sarharan Africa, a country whose entire population seem to eat only in back yards or shopping centres. Like a kind of open prison for gastronomes.

Their latest offering is Kato Paphos, the Avanti Holiday village piazza, a defunct shopping centre cum outdoor food hall with a tiny car park and a three kilometre round trip if you miss the nonexistent signage and the faint waft of chip fat.

Inside resembles a Borstal common room. Black painted walls, graffitied with daily fish prices in a dialect spoken only in Peckham and Camberwell comprehensives.

Think “da best feeshing spot in da world, we’ll put our feesh on da block, in da pan”.

The menu is big and fishy with lots of platters and combinations of the same food. They have a sushi bar which sells amongst other things a sushi fashion sandwich, now also available in the Roy Keane hospitality suite at Old Trafford.

Admittedly I wasn’t brave enough to try the sushi. As a general rule I don’t eat fish unless I can at least smell the sea it once lived in, and to my knowledge salmon hasn’t been landed off the Paphos pier for some years so I stuck to da ship mates platter for one, with some prince prawns, mussels fried fish and two types of calamari.

Complementary bread and dips were true to their Cypriot origins and service was straight off the brand production line, script perfect but lacking any personality with the “I need the money but don’t intend of being here very long” characterless swagger.

Da platter came with a choice of chips, rice or a healthy side salad, enough for da whale! And it all came in a large stainless steel, animal friendly, feeding frenzy trough, encouraging you to ditch the cutlery, roll up your sleeves and get it all into the mix.

Individually all of the constituent parts of the platter were above your run of mill brand average standard. River Nile perch was liberally seasoned and grilled to the point of cooked rather than the cook it to rubber, just to be on the safe side usual brand manifesto. Prince prawns were split in half, slathered in butter and blasted with fire to their moreish, suck the heads dry best. New Zealand green lip mussel plump but watery, befitting of frozen shellfish flown halfway around the world and calamari tubes were more bicycle inner tubes so it was left to the criminally underused calamari tentacles, the herb encrusted, crunchy, crispy jewels in the finding Nemo offal crown to save da day.

So the fish tasted good, the seafood well enough cooked and true to their word, there was enough for da whale. It’s not perfect – the pool of congealed fat and tetra-pack beurre blanc swimming around in the platter could have been leftovers from a liposuction slumber party, but so what?

It’s not trying to be perfect. What it is trying to do is serve reasonable food at a reasonable price and for the most part, feedback has been positive – positive enough that number three is about to roll off the conveyor belt sometime soon in Nicosia.

Let’s hope in the meantime it stays off the whisky and continues to be da beest brand in da town.