Leaves of Glass

The summer before I graduated from college, I had this feeling that maybe a bachelor’s degree wouldn’t be enough to propel me into the fame and fortune that still, unfortunately, eludes me. It was this prophetic instinct that led me to enroll at the International School of Bartending, where I spent a couple of weeks learning how to make a lot of different cocktails, including a few I would never actually serve to people. I’m still waiting for someone to ask me to shake up a silver fizz.

The school also found me my first job as a professional bartender, working the service bar at a Chinese restaurant. Only a couple of the employees spoke a word of English, so it took me days to figure out that mee-kita meant frozen margarita — which, inexplicably, was a popular cocktail there — and bloo was a boo-loo bowl, a narcotic combination of pineapple juice, honey and several kinds of rum. If I couldn’t translate a drink order, I simply mixed up an ass-kicking zombie and everyone was happy.

It was a typical lowbrow Chinese-American joint that served very bad chop suey, bland pineapple-fried rice and egg foo yong smothered in brown gravy. No wonder the clientele drank so much. To fortify myself during those long shifts, I drank pots and pots of the strong oolong tea that was always steeping in a big metal tureen in the kitchen. The place attracted a boozy crowd, so not many customers ordered tea, but if they did, the only option was that oolong. The owners could have been serving Lipton for all their clientele knew or cared.

Things are different now. Some restaurant customers order tea with the savoir faire of a wine connoisseur weighing the choices on a list of great vintages. In fact, the tea selection is nearly as long as the wine list at the three-month-old Green Tea Restaurant & Bar in Prairie Village. The “hot tea” menu lists 11 choices (including four noncaffeinated teas) and the “special hot tea” list adds four more options. There are sweet milk teas and bubble teas, too — even an iced bubble coffee.

The elaborate tea list, along with the menu and the décor, reflect a more global approach to serving Asian cuisine. Although the venue’s two young owners — 30-year-old David Tai and his 24-year-old brother, Daniel — grew up working in their family’s traditional Chinese-American restaurants (their parents own the China Town Cafés in Independence, Overland Park and Blue Springs), they pull together different ethnic culinary styles for Green Tea’s eclectic menu.

Sure, there are the expected plates of orange beef, General Tso’s chicken and shrimp-fried rice, but the house specialties include Korean-style beef ribs and Vietnamese-style seafood. And even though Prairie Village is notoriously conservative in its culinary tastes, the Tai brothers are successfully encouraging the locals to look past the pineapple chicken and try some of the less familiar stuff.

“Our best-selling dish is phad Thai,” David says. “But people are even ordering the Korean hot pot, which is pretty spicy.”

I ventured in for the first time on a Sunday afternoon, joined by my fussy friend Ned — who isn’t very fond of Chinese restaurants but was instantly attracted to Green Tea’s tasteful interior design. He admired the aubergine-stained concrete floors, the comfortable tan leatherette booths, the sunny yellow walls and the background music.

“They’re playing Burt Bacharach,” he whispered as we settled into a booth. We agreed to share a pot of ginseng green tea. It arrived in a pretty little pot, but Ned pouted that it had been brewed with a tea bag. “You would think they use loose tea and a strainer,” he griped. We discovered later that only the “special” hot teas are made with loose dried flowers and served with a more elaborate presentation.

As we sipped our hot drinks, I went to work on the pile of fried shrimp and vegetables on the tempura platter I had all to myself. Ned’s new diet forbids all carbohydrates, even the light, airy tempura batter encasing the crispy shrimp, carrots and zucchini. It was his loss — the appetizer was excellent.

He was rewarded soon enough with a plate of lusciously marinated tender short ribs called kalbi kui. The kitchen had prepared the meat Korean-style, rubbing the beef with garlic, soy and brown sugar. Ned thought it was fantastic, though the accompanying kimchi — a fiery fermented cabbage — almost took his breath away.

I ordered a “Chinese wrap,” which is what the Tai brothers call their version of that old Chinese-American standby, stir-fried moo shu. But regardless of its sneaky name, the beef version I ordered, cooked with bamboo shoots, onion, green onions and vermicelli noodles, still looked pretty moo shu to me, right down to the rice-pancake wrapper and the syrupy plum sauce.

I returned on the following Saturday night with Marilyn and Billie, who took a sip of the ginger tea that I ordered and immediately asked our server for a vodka chaser. Marilyn ordered a glass of wine. Billie had proclaimed herself a dumpling expert, so I asked our gum-chewing waitress — a snappy little chicklet from Brooklyn — for an order of the dumplings, half of them steamed, the other half fried. Billie said the doughy dumpling wrapper was “too thick” and the pork filling “too stingy,” and she was right on both counts. We’d also ordered the “pan-Asian” eggrolls. Marilyn thought the sugary sweet-and-sour sauce looked disturbingly like the candy-apple paint job on a new motorcycle, but she spooned some of it on the crunchy roll anyway. It tasted like a melted cherry lollipop.

By this point, it was clear that the Green Tea’s serving staff, which couldn’t have been more attractive or friendly, were missing some of the finer points of waiting tables. We practically had to beg for small plates for our appetizers. And our waitress didn’t know much about the tea selection or most of the dishes on the menu. When I asked Miss Brooklyn, for example, about the “chef’s special sauce” served with the crispy sole, she wrinkled her nose and announced, “I never tried it. But it looks blackened, you know. Like, brown. Maybe it has some pepper in it.”

Not the best sales pitch, honey. I would have loved to sample the Peking duck, but this dish must be ordered 24 hours in advance. “We don’t make it a week earlier, refrigerate it and heat it up in a microwave like some other restaurants do,” David Tai told me later. “We only serve it freshly roasted.” So we decided to share the phad Thai and the mysterious-sounding “Hot Plate,” modestly described on the menu as “beef and scallops served on a hot plate.”

“I hope there’s more to it than that,” Billie said. There was, slightly: It was a sizzling metal platter heaped with thin slices of tender braised beef and fat steamed scallops cooked with translucent curls of white onion and scallions. Sort of like an Asian fajita platter.

We all loved the phad Thai, a spicy jumble of stir-fried rice noodles, finely chopped chicken, peanuts and scallions. “It’s the best thing here,” Billie raved. “I can’t stop eating it.”

She was considerably less enthusiastic about the “special hot tea” that I ordered as a finale. The glass pot of jasmine green tea came perched over a flickering votive candle. It was pretty, but we waited a good 10 minutes for it to steep before I poured a cup for each of us.

“I like the look of it,” Billie said after the first sip. The taste was a different matter.

Marilyn described it as “hot perfumed water.”

What they both needed was a nice stiff zombie, but you can’t get one at Green Tea’s bar. Or a boo-loo bowl. David Tai says he’s never even heard of those cocktails.

What a sorry state of world affairs.