Fortune Smiles

I can’t decide what was more disappointing about the finale to my first meal at NCK Restaurant, the seven-month-old Chinese place in the Watts Mill Shopping Center: the ridiculously stale fortune cookie (I could stretch it like Silly Putty) or the idiotic message that fell out of it. I’ve had strange fortunes before, but “There is a gradual improvement” wins the award for the most vague.

At least it wasn’t a cliché, like the one I found inside a really good, crispy cookie in San Francisco’s Chinatown: “You bring happiness wherever you go.” Even I know that’s a lie. But if the fortunes at NCK are too weird to offer up clichés, the restaurant itself is one: the classic stereotype of a Chinese-American restaurant. And that’s exactly what I like about the place. Just when you thought the 20th century was over, a place like NCK opens and you can walk out of the parking lot and right into 1965.

The 1965 that I remember as a kid, anyway, when going to a Chinese restaurant was an adventure, the atmosphere almost surreal. In those days, it was rare to find a Chinese restaurant serving its non-Asian diners anything hotter than pepper steak. I don’t think I heard the word Szechwan until the 1970s. (Food writer John Mariani thinks Nixon’s 1972 trip to China changed the way Americans perceived regional Chinese fare.) Then, suddenly, old, bland, Americanized standbys such as chow mein and lemon chicken fell out of favor and everyone wanted spicy.

NCK makes a boldfaced claim on its carry-out menu, promising “A Brand New Way of Chinese Cuisine Dining Sensation,” adding, in italics, “The only authentic Szechwan restaurant in KC.” Neither is accurate, but that’s just part of the lunacy that makes NCK so damned lovable. Start with the name of the restaurant. The manager, Peter Young, insists that it’s NCK, although the sign over the front door reads “New China King.” (He also points out that there’s no connection between this New China King and the lowbrow China King a few blocks east.)

What is brand-new is the restaurant’s décor, which a friend of mine compared to the McDonald’s on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s just as noisy, with all kinds of hard surfaces. Workers gutted the location (which was home to the popular Imperial Palace restaurant for years before briefly becoming the second site of Chopstix), retaining only the shiny green-and-gold ceiling tiles and a ferocious golden dragon leering down from above. A friend of mine who frequents the shopping center swears that the new interior was constructed from a Chinese restaurant kit that was dropped off by a delivery truck.

That’s possible. The postmodernist interior now boasts sand-colored floor tiles, laminated table tops, glass-panel dividers painted with cuddly pandas, and two TVs mounted on opposite corners of the main dining room. On my first visit, one of them was tuned to the Disney Channel. You might say it’s a gradual improvement over what was once there.

My friend Patrick adored it. “It’s bad verging on good,” he said, noting that the walls had been painted the same shade of mustard-yellow favored by some fast-food chains — a vibrant tone that reportedly makes customers want to eat and run — and the waiters’ shirts were the same color. That being said, the service couldn’t be more relaxed, and the kitchen isn’t exactly snappy.

What makes NCK more than OK is the food. That is, if you like traditional Cantonese-American cooking. Despite the “authentic Szechwan” claim, most of the dishes on the menu’s first eight plastic-covered pages — the ones in English — are 1960s-era Chinese: six kinds of egg foo yong, bland chow mein, five versions of moo-shu, and the ubiquitous Happy Family dinner (this one claiming to include real lobster and crabmeat). There are Hunan and Szechwan dinners, too, but they’re distinctly in the minority.

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For Patrick and me, the really thrilling discovery was a Kennedy-era pu-pu platter. Just as I remembered, it included a tiny “grill” and a compartmentalized wooden bowl tidily arranged with spring rolls, tempura-dipped fried shrimp, barbecued spare ribs, crab rangoon and two slices of chow-chow beef. (Who cared if it was so overcooked that it tasted like jerky?)

After the pu-pu, Patrick was in love with the place — especially the scallion pancakes, which aren’t thin, fried and crispy but are as puffy as flapjacks and flaky as croissants, and the moo-shu pork, which our waiter (a recent University of Kansas engineering graduate) haphazardly created with plum sauce and rice pancakes. “It’s fabulous,” Patrick proclaimed. My own Cantonese-style almond chicken — one of NCK’s specialties — was more heavy than flavorful, but I had ordered it out of nostalgia, not desire.

The following Sunday, I brought Ned along for the weekend dim sum. It was distinctly less glamorous than the Bo Ling’s version, but the mood was festive — even if few of the smiling servers could explain what little delicacies they were offering on their wobbly carts. Who cared? Ned and I nibbled on shrimp paste on green peppers, cold spiced tripe (not bad, really), shrimp balls and gooey fried puffs embedded with microscopic bits of pork, as well as some awful spare ribs slathered with black-bean sauce.

Ned griped that no one had polished the metal teapots and that the harsh lighting made him look older than Anna May Wong. He hated NCK, but my friends Joe and Jim were both charmed and amused by the restaurant when we ate dinner there the following night.

Sure, there was a slight language barrier. The server brought out a plate of cold, shelled edamame sprinkled with sesame-seed oil. “Is this edamame?” Jim asked. “I don’t know,” the server said with a shrug. He also wasn’t sure what the hell I ordered when I impulsively turned to the back of the menu, which lists dozens of dishes in Chinese script. I pointed to a listing in the middle of the page and announced, “I want that.” The server told me it was a chicken dish roasted with ginger, but he didn’t know if it had a name. It didn’t matter; he quickly came back to say that the kitchen didn’t have the dish. I blindly pointed to another listing. “A very spicy chicken,” he said. “And not on the other menu.” You know, the American one.

It was a good bet — a big, steaming bowl of chopped chicken breast, bok choy, onion, celery, fresh cilantro and lots of garlic in a chili-spiced broth. It was a wonderful dish, head-clearing and emotionally satisfying. My less-adventurous guests stuck to the familiar stuff: a plate of fiery but excellent kung pao lamb and a snazzy sizzling beef prepared tableside with succulent, tender slices of beef dropped onto a white-hot metal platter, doused with pepper sauce and heaped with vegetables.

We also asked for some Szechwan shrimp, to see if it was authentic. “How would we know?” Jim wondered. “We’re not from China.” Well, it was authentically like any other version of the dish I’ve tasted at numerous Chinese restaurants in town, which must have meant something.

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At last, we couldn’t eat another bite, and the server brought out the check and three cellophane-wrapped fortune cookies. They were still stale and inedible, but this time I got a fortune I believed in: “You bring joy wherever you go.”

It’s a gradual improvement.