Not all the gems sparkle at Crystal Jade Palace

By John Aglionby

JAKARTA (JP): Any restaurant that not only has its lobby seats filled regularly but also the overflow area outside must be a quality establishment, or so one would think. But, as with many things in life, appearances can be deceptive.

I thought I had circumvented the popularity of the Crystal Jade Palace, located behind the Fashion Cafe on the ground floor of Wisma 46, by both booking in advance and arriving on time.

No such luck. Not only had the front desk given my table to someone else, I was still waiting half an hour later. Perhaps the management can afford to be so hopelessly inefficient and chaotic because there are 50 floors of hungry office workers with few alternative lunch spots slaving away above them. I, however, was not impressed.

Three days later, I ventured back. This time, we got past the lobby and to a table. The fact that we had to ask for the menus once we got there seemed of little consequence after the triumph of actually getting a seat.

Two words of advice at this point. Take a jacket or sweater. The sports hall of a room -- there are no nooks and corners to have a quiet candlelit dinner in a room decorated in styles from 1920s art deco to 1990s functional -- was freezing. We were covered in goosebumps before we knew it, which the never-ending supply of tea served by overattentive waitresses did little to remedy.

The other tip would be not to go with anyone indecisive, or you'll be there forever. Fifteen minutes after arriving, we were still ploughing through the 143 items on the regular menu and 32 varieties of Dim Sum.

As it turned out, we might as well not have bothered because we ended up with some dishes we had not ordered and instead were served items we had taken care to avoid.

Once the teething problems are ironed out, the service should improve. The snag is that the quality of the food -- styled as Hong Kong/international -- varied from exquisite to awful, with a good dose of mediocrity in between.

Most of the various Dim Sum selections were tasty and combined well together. The spring rolls had a subtle, tangy flavor, although the accompanying sauce tasted bitter and of not very much at all; the deep-fried Wan-Ton in a sweet and sour sauce was excellent; the deep fried mixed meat dumpling was a little stodgy, but offset the other dishes well and another dish none of us could identify. We certainly hadn't ordered it and could detect chicken and mushrooms, but nothing on the menu consisted of chicken and mushrooms.

There were no such identity problems with the final Dim Sum dish. It was clearly chicken feet, although they had definitely not come from an Indonesian chicken, as they were far too fatty. The sauce was a brown jelly-like mass with far too high a monosodium glutamate (MSG) content for my liking.

Our noodles with crab meat and dry shrimp proved to be as anonymous as the dish we hadn't ordered -- or perhaps we weren't brought noodles with crab meat and dry shrimp.

Never having been to Hong Kong, I was not aware of what the serving sizes meant. There were three on offer: small, medium and large. Unfortunately, we were not told that "small" meant large, "medium" enormous and the large portions probably require two waiters to bring them to the table.

The only way to get a reasonably small helping is to go for the snacks. The marinated duck meat Chiu Chow style would have been the a main course in most other restaurants, and was as good as any duck I have eaten in Jakarta.

The same could be said for the deep-fried prawns with garlic. They were cooked simply, but rolled gently out of their shells and down one's throat, leaving one wanting more.

Equally impressive was the fried rice with chicken tomato sauce over one half and cream of prawn sauce covering the other. The MSG content was just about right, the flavors were not overpowered by spices and indeed this too could easily be a meal in itself.

We did not fare so well with the rest of the pot-luck meal. The overcooked vegetables took one back to school-dinner days; the stewed brisket in a claypot was fatty and swamped in MSG and the fresh abalone and sea cucumber with dry shrimp roe was stunningly bland.