Twice-cooked tofu, a Sichuanese dish, presents tender tofu crisp-fried and bathed in spice.
If you’ve got a hankering for Chinese food, you can take comfort in this statistic: According to the trade journal Chinese Restaurant News, there were more than 43,000 independent Chinese restaurants in the United States in 2019.
The pandemic has surely seen closures, but still, that was triple the 13,443 U.S. McDonald’s locations in 2021. I’d much rather have a bowl of Jasmine Asian Bistro’s Sichuanese cucumber salad than a Big Mac anyway.
Still, when we parse that 43,000 tally, the number of really first-rate Chinese sit-down restaurants does start to shrink. There are the old-school Chinese-American spots that go all the way back to the Gold Rush, specializing in culturally blended dishes that immigrant restaurateurs developed to make the locals happy: chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo yung.
You’ve got the more modern neighborhood Chinese – there’s one next door to just about every supermarket in town – a vast menu that seems the same everywhere, designed primarily for takeout. There’s a ton of Chinese buffets, although buffet dining took a pounding during the pandemic.
Finally, we come down to a handful of comfortable, sit-down Chinese restaurants with table service, a comprehensive menu that covers the basics of the Chinese canon, and ideally an English-language “authentic Chinese” menu that offers mysterious yet strangely enticing items like Hong Shao whole yellow croaker or, wait for it, intestine with tofu hot pot.
By the time we get to this final category, we’re down to just a handful of candidates locally; and Jasmine Asian Bistro tops my list right now. Sibling of the larger Jasmine Szechwan Chinese Cuisine in the far East End, it’s my go-to when I’m hankering for a serious Chinese meal.
That hankering has mostly had to be satisfied by takeout, of course, since Jasmine Bistro opened in its Lime Kiln Lane shopping center space just a few months before the pandemic closed local eateries to dining in. So I was doubly happy the other day to take a seat in a comfortable, enclosed booth well removed from other tables.
The extensive menu includes about 220 Chinese dishes, including about 90 in the “Chinese authentic” section; it’s tilted toward the spicy fare of China’s Sichuan region but goes beyond to include other regional favorites. There are also about 60 sushi options including rolls and nigiri sushi bites and combo platters. ...
Read the complete article on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/jasmi ... ro-chinese
You'll also find this review in LEO Weekly's Food & Drink section today.
http://www.leoweekly.com/category/food-drink/
Jasmine Asian Bistro
2420 Lime Kiln Lane
618-3000
http://jasmineasianbistroky.com
