Pu pu platters. Hilarious “Yellow Peril”-era fonts. Fortunes that are actually written in future tense (whatever happened to those?). These are some of the more charming defining characteristics of Chinese-American restaurants, which spread like wildfire throughout the midcentury United States. As it goes, immigrant railroad workers were all men, and so could only half-assedly reproduce the dishes of their homeland (especially given the lack of on-hand ingredients); whites developed quite a yen for these watered-down, sweetened-up, gravyish renditions of the cuisine, and so the Chinese-American restaurant—and one of our favorite Christmas alternatives—was born.

China Palace is the very embodiment of this tradition, in all its vaguely-Pacific-Rimmed glory. Still, a genre born of cheap imitation can be capable of some very good things: a truly hot and sour soup, brown sauces that are infused with garlicky intrigue and chili heat, magically crispy beef with savory orange rind glaze. Unfortunately, China Palace has none of these things. It gets close—kung pao chicken’s satisfactory enough—which is something we can’t even say for Snow Pea. Hunan beef is fine, if less the spice level of Hunan and more that of Ontario. But we all, now and then, get a hankering for oily chow mein, crispy eggrolls, and even sweet and sour pork…and you can do much worse than this. And at least they deliver (with a $22 minimum order, and through a third-party company).