Cheap Eats - Get lei’d
There’s two kinds of Chinese food. You’ve got the sort of subtle, multilayered cooking where you can taste the chef’s heartache for the motherland in every bite, featured in spots like Little Szechuan. Then there’s the food you go for at the end of the month when you’ve spent all your money on beer. It’s perfectly fine, artless food that fills your belly and comforts you with sweet brown gravy and canned baby corn. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
Take it from a Wong in the know: Our food’s a lot like lovin’. Sometimes you want sizzling beef tendons that stir your soul, sometimes you just want an anonymous egg roll. Aloha offers that unassuming egg roll, plus soup, crab rangoon, fried rice and a meat-and-veg lunch entree heavy on the gravy for right around $6. You won’t reach the climax of Chinese cuisine here, but you certainly won’t leave disappointed.
Familiar fare: Located next to what used to be Blue Trout and is now the home of Smokey Q, Aloha features a small, sun-bleached patio and a clean, nondescript interior. Aloha’s menu looks and reads like your typical Chinese menu, printed on four-fold paper with more dishes and options than you could ever run through in a lifetime. Yet in addition to the usual suspects of pot stickers, sizzling rice soup, kung pao and mu shu are several varieties of curry and sushi specials. Call me cynical, but I’ll call Aloha out for what I believe it is: a decent Chinese restaurant with extra frosting. You can’t go wrong with tried and true Chinese appetizers such as the zesty, crispy-coated and not-too-greasy salt and pepper fried calamari ($5.50). The tender and crusty pot stickers ($4.25) are moist and oh so porky.
Extra mayo, please: Aloha’s crispy golden shrimp with walnuts ($11.95) is a perfectly competent version of a less common dish. Mayonnaise may not seem to have anything to do with Chinese food, but these battered, deep-fried shrimp tossed in a honey and mayonnaise sauce and topped with candied walnuts are a specialty hailing from Hong Kong. Here, the shrimp are small but crunchy under a heavy hand of mayo and just the right amount of honey. Sauteed sting beans ($7.75) are punchy and pungent with black beans, soy sauce and garlic. They provide zingy contrast to our rich meal.
You’re in the army now: Everyone’s favorite Chinese take-out item, General Tso’s chicken ($8.50), is in pretty good form here. Nuggets of chicken thickly coated in batter and swathed in sticky, spicy sauce satisfy a craving for salt, grease and sugar. I especially like the lunch special of chicken with basil leaves ($5.95). The heap of carrots, zucchini and baby corn with chunks of chicken in a zippy basil and chili sauce is lively, the vegetables fresh and crisp.
This restaurant won’t be the Chinese love of your life, but when you need that soy sauce fix, Aloha will do just fine.