There are different tier of Chinese restaurants in the US, largely: high tier dining (which is mostly in the big cities), traditional cuisine restaurants (which are slowly expanding outside of the bigger cities, following migration), older restaurants (which focused on quality), and mass market buffets and takeout Chinese.  Out of these , mass market buffets dominate in quantity and it is regrettable that the face of Chinese cuisine in the US are these mass market restaurants.  The concept itself isn’t bad, but the temptation to churn out cheap quality and cheap tasting food must be immense and thus these restaurants mostly seem to focus on bland and tasteless food.  These restaurants are almost all the same and there are essentially starter kits for such places.  Why these are popular, the OH Food Guy doesn’t understand and can’t comprehend this popularity; and occasionally, even the OH Food Guy winds up in such places by curiosity or mistake.  

The Silver Palace has been a Chinese restaurant in the Portsmouth, OH area for 10+ years.  While driving by we decided to try it.  At first we were optimistic.  The dining area was clean and nicely decorated.  It was a very pleasant environment and the windows give a good view of the action on the street.  The generic Chinese menu pictures above the counter should have caused some concern since those are usually seen at the generic Chinese take out places.  Digging deeper, the bathroom was not exactly clean and both its floor was sticky and the toilet was dirty.

The menu had some items which sounded reasonably authentic as well, such as Mapo Tofu – which is more common at traditional restaurants.   However, the food that came out was significantly disappointing to us.   We ordered a House Special Soup, Kung Pao Chicken, and Mapo Tofu.   None were particularly good by our measure. 

The broth of the House Special Soup was very yellow, appearing heavily dyed from a generic chick broth mix, and was very salty.  All meat in the dishes gave us a slight taste of freezer burn.  The sauces were heavy and overly sugary.  The tofu was the best part, it was edible even if the sauce was overly heavy.  The Kung Pao Chicken was reasonably spicy, but the flavor profile was not great in our opinion and had the same taste issues with the meat as in the other dishes.

.

We did not take any left overs home, it was not worth it in our mind.  Reviews are oddly positive for Silver Palace, even saying it is 5/5 in Ohio, which does not make sense to us since there are many extremely good options for Chinese in Ohio.   This is especially true in Columbus and Cincinnati, but even in Portsmouth we would rank Yamato higher, let alone the superb Jade East, which is sadly focused on takeout since the pandemic.  Overall, we do not plan to come back.  The service was good, but the food was not to our liking.  There is nothing here that we would like to try again.  Any of the dishes here we can, and do, cook at home better.