BBQ KING – We No Rike Fried Rice
Why do people order fried rice in Chinese restaurants?
It’s never very good and rarely justifies the six or seven bucks charged for it.
The only question that haunts ELV more is why all the tea in all Chinese restaurants never tastes like anything but warm, muddy water.
At its best, fried rice (made with day old rice that has lost some moisture) is a caramelized delight, chock full of tasty tidbits of egg, ham, shrimp or whatever minced veggies the cook has lying around.
What you usually get is stuff that is hardly crispy and sweet, speckled with a few meagre strands of egg and a dotting of barely-there proteins. (As you can see from the not-so-tasty snap above, what they usually throw at you is warmed-over rice with a few chunks of this or that thrown in to justify the price.)
But still, bad fried rice is better than no fried rice at all, so we soldier on, hoping against hope that one day we’ll find one that comes close to what we used to make in our own kitchen. (We’ve given up on finding any good tea in any Chinese restaurant anywhere but Hong Kong.)
That quibble aside, you can do a lot worse than the barbecue platter of Chinese meat at BBQ King (although the ma po dofu isn’t as good as that at Emperor Szechuan down the street, or J & J Szechuan in the same shopping center), and it only takes cash.
Regardless of these low points, our lunch with uber-writer/personality Danny (“Bunny”) Axelrod was most pleasant, as between bites of toothsome, candied pork, succulent duck and salty chicken, we discussed everything from voter fraud to spicy foods to the European debt crisis. How many foodies can you do that with?
In fact, the conversation was so good, it almost made us forget how tepid the fried rice was.
Just thought you’d rike to know.
ELV’s meal for two came to $43 including a $7 tip.
BBQ KING
5650 West Spring Mountain Road
Las Vegas, NV 89146
702.368.8688
Restaurant reviews, quips, picks and pans-with some seriously salivating history-from the man who eats his way through Sin City every day.
July 16th, 2012 at 8:07 am
Are the f**king racial slurs necessary?
July 16th, 2012 at 8:58 am
ELV responds: A racial slur is a punch line like: “Loose shoes, tight p*ssy and a warm place to sh*t.” What we did is make fun of a pronunciation. F*cking PC moralist.
July 16th, 2012 at 9:03 am
…just like we make fun of the way Southern people talk, French people talk and Max Jacobson talks all the time.
July 16th, 2012 at 9:11 am
This is completely unrelated to this post but I was wondering if you have a list of must hit/best restaurants on Spring Mountain Rd. Thanks!!
July 16th, 2012 at 9:15 am
ELV responds:
Dear Russ,
Thank you for you comment and question. Please buy my book.
Best and bon appetit,
ELV
July 16th, 2012 at 9:51 am
HA! I read the title as “BB King”.
Fried Rice? Chinese tea? Curry? Ma po dofu? What happened? Did BB go all Asian on us? Finally realized I was in the wrong restaurant.
P.S. Shouldn’t it be “Flied Lice”?
July 16th, 2012 at 10:14 am
John: The headline should have read “We No Likee Fyied Lice”….now that is closer to the dialogue/dialect I have heard in these SE Asian joints! LOL! God I love reading your columns, they makes my day! When is the next edition of your book due out?
July 16th, 2012 at 10:22 am
The letters l, r and n are non-distinctive in Cantonese, so fried rice could be flied rice, fnied rice, flied lice, flied nice, flied rice, and finally even fried rice, when pronouced by a native speaker of that dialect. Just thought your readers would like to know. PS-why don’t you offer your loyal readers some free legal advice sometime. At least then, you’d be good for something, you racist clown.
July 16th, 2012 at 10:36 am
It seems there is a BBQ King in every corner of the (enlightened) world. Here in Sydney our version is a glorious old school canteen on Goulburn Street trading well into the AM hours. It is regularly frequented by taxi drivers and our city’s top chefs, who with appetites sharpened by quitting time beers after wielding the skillets for a few hours, tend to arrive around midnight flaunting their familiarity. There is, however, a certain inverted snobbery from Hong Kong friends of mine, who claim they would never be seen inside the place. They express a preference for the more upmarket Golden Century on Sussex Street diagonally opposite the BBQ King, which is owned by the same group of Chinatown businessmen. My experience at BBQ King has never been bad. Probably because the novelty value of paying excessive prices to sit in dingy surroundings and eat dishes that are often merely average just for the dubious privilege of either spotting a celebrity chef (dread term) or name dropping BBQ King while setting up for dinner the following evening in order to seek credibility from my then colleagues or to fill a some deep, yawning chasm of insecurity regarding food knowledge has never been particularly high on my list of priorities.
July 16th, 2012 at 11:30 am
Hey 8Max J, here is some free legal advice, take your linguist intellecutal BS and shove it up your anal pore! It will remind you of the last decent meal you consumed on Planet Earth! Then file a writ of mandamus in District Court to demand your money be returned.
July 17th, 2012 at 8:17 am
Ordering mapo doufu at a Cantonese joint is your first mistake, akin to ordering gumbo in New England. Also, Chinese BBQ demands white rice like Southern BBQ demands whitebread.
July 23rd, 2012 at 8:17 pm
I’m constantly perplexed by white people who are offended by plays on pronounciation and words like “oriental”. My parents who were born in China and lived much of their lives there often switch the R & L’s just for laughs. They also refer to themselves as oriental.
Oh, and why do people order fried rice in Chinese restaurants? Because they’re white.