Jin Ciao. The new food stop.

Olga and I couldn’t decide what we wanted to eat tonight. Olga was too tired to cook. I was too lazy to do so. Olga was mildly hungry, while I wanted a hot supper. We were discussing several usual options, but nothing felt appealing. So I dived my hand into the box with all delivery menus that we have and started to check them all out one by one.

Somehow I ended up holding the Jin Ciao Chinese Food menu. Jin Ciao must be the most promoted Chinese food brand in the country. They have several spots in Limassol alone. Their ads appear on television. And thier place is permanently reserved in the Municipal Garden for large events, like Limassol Annual Wine Festival.

Strangely though we never tried it. Our favourite Chinese delivery was Pagoda and our choice for Chinese food out was China Town Restaurant. We’ve also been in a couple of other Chinese restaurants, and found them pretty good, but not as good as Pagoda and the China Town.

Anyway, the menu informed us that Jin Ciao is open from 12:00 until 14:30 and from 17:30 until 23:00. That is a somewhat regular schedule for the local restaurants. The time was about 20:30, so we were covered. Prices in the menu suggested that the place was neither cheap, neither expensive. Average prices. But we didn’t know anything about the size of the portions. Except for prawns. Prawns were clearly marked in the menu – regular prawn portions include 7 pieces, while king size prawns are bundled in 4 pieces.

The general rule to follow when portion sizes are unknown is to ask someone who knows. We didn’t have anyone in the know, so we followed the next best advice – order more rather than order less. Here is what we asked for: Minced Beef Soup (1.50 CYP), 1 portion of Vegetarian Spring Rolls that included for pieces of unknown size (2.25 CYP), Spare Ribs with Barbeque Sauce (3.25 CYP), House Special Fried Rice that was said to include king prawns, shrimps, sweet corn, chicken and vegetables (4.25 CYP), Vegetable Noodles (3.00 CYP), and Lemon Chicken (3.75 CYP). Yeah, I know it sounds a lot. But we figured that if won’t finish something, it could be still eatable tomorrow, microwaved. In the worst case scenario, though, if we wouldn’t like the food, we could have more options to choose from.

About half an hour later we got our order. I paid 18.00 CYP for the food .80 CYP for delivery of that big and heavy plastic bag. No confusions or mistakes were made – our order was all in there. No extras too. And it was all properly aligned. That is important when you order lots of sauce or soups.

Although all the food was packed in the standard plastic dishes, it somehow still managed to look good. Yes, just from the look of it we knew that we would like it.

We started opening everything and there was A LOT OF food, I’ll tell you that. There was no way that two of us could it all of it in one sitting. Olga opened the spring rolls first. There were four of them, as promised, by they were large. Each one was about 10 centimeters long and 3 centimeters wide, while being a couple of centimeters thick. I used both of mine as bread while eating the soup. Soup was good and there was plenty of it too. Olga almost managed to eat half of her lemon chicken. It was delicious, but there was just too much of it. I tried it too and it was very good. The meat was tender and the sauce was sour. It also had this distinct taste of lemon rather than lemon flavour.

When I finished my bowl of soup and two spring rolls I didn’t feel hungry anymore. If I had that soup bowl with all four spring rolls, I wouldn’t need anymore food. But I didn’t and I still had a lot to try. Spare ribs in barbeque sauce looked very yummy. The sauce was interesting. It was home made and very different from your regular canned barbeque sauce. It looked more like some dark soup. It was very lequid and there was plenty of it. The ribs too didn’t look like something I am used to. They weren’t grilled or fried. Probably they were fried a bit though. And boiled. Or something like that. Maybe they were cooked in the oven with all that sauce. They smelled and tasted good too. There were about 6 pieces and I managed to eat only 4.

Olga had a little bit of noodles and was full. I looked at my rice, but I knew there’s just no space inside of me. I didn’t want to touch it. But there were those king prowns inside and I am a bit weak when it comes to sea food. So I just picked two or three prawns out of the rice with chopsticks and that was it.

Summary:

• We ordered a lot of food.
• We tried everything except for the rice.
• Everything we tried was excellent.
• We didn’t manage to eat everything. Just about the half of it.
• We paid as much as we would usually pay, but considering the size of portions I’d say it was rather cheap.

Conclusion: Jin Ciao has definetely made it to the top of our food spots list. We will be ordering from them more in the future. Probably we’ll also go and eat at their place just to check it out.

P.S.: If you want to try them, the phone number on the menu is 77-77-17-07. This is also marked as Agios Filaxeos branch in Limassol. I know there is also one on Griva Digeni street. And I think I saw one in the tourist area, but I’m not very sure I did.