What is Jade Palace?
Jade Palace is the Chinese restaurant the north side of Scottsdale has eaten at for thirty years, and the one it eats at on Christmas. The original sits at 9160 E Shea Boulevard, Suite 101, in the strip center on the north side of Shea Boulevard at 92nd Street, in the Shea Corridor, and it opened in 1996. A second Jade Palace, at 8876 E Pinnacle Peak Road, Suite 104, on the northeast corner of Pinnacle Peak and Pima, came later; the press we found does not record its opening year, but it was there by 2015.
The owners are the Mei family, who tell their story on the restaurant’s website. It goes back three generations to Guangdong Province, where Grandfather Mei (pronounced May) owned a restaurant on the outskirts of Hong Kong. The family emigrated in the 1980s and worked in a restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown, the most competitive Chinese dining market in the country. Friends in Arizona kept calling to say the Phoenix area had almost no good Chinese food, and in 1996 the family gave in and opened on Shea. Today the brothers Leon and Davlen Mei run the two rooms, Leon at Shea and Davlen at Pinnacle Peak, and an OpenTable listing names Andy Mei as executive chef.
The cooking is Cantonese and Hong Kong-style with Szechuan heat where the dish calls for it, which the family describes as Szechuan spices meeting the hot fires of Cantonese cooking. What the regulars order is Peking duck, the New York-style egg rolls, spare ribs, Mongolian beef and the Singapore rice noodles, and what sets the room apart from the strip-mall norm is a wine list the family calls a robust inventory of bottles from around the world. The room itself was built for the neighborhood: New Times’ 1997 review described white linen, Western cutlery, Chopin on the speakers, tiered dining areas and cactus arrangements, a Chinese restaurant for the new subdivisions east of Pima.
It is for the families of the Shea Corridor and Scottsdale Ranch, for the Jewish community that fills it on December 25, and for anyone who wants a sit-down Chinese dinner with a tablecloth and a decent Burgundy. Our verdict: not the most adventurous Chinese kitchen in the Valley and not trying to be, but the most durable one in Scottsdale, and a better restaurant than its 1997 review.
Ordering at Jade Palace
Order the duck and the noodles. Peking duck is the plate the readers who voted Jade Palace the Valley’s best Chinese restaurant in 2015 keep naming, along with the New York-style egg rolls and the spare ribs; the egg rolls are the clearest tie to the family’s Chinatown years. The 1997 New Times review, which found most of the menu too polite, made exceptions for Seafood in a Love Nest (scallops, shrimp and real crab in a crisp taro-root shell with broccoli, snow peas and straw mushrooms), the Singapore-style rice noodles with shrimp, chicken and pork in a curry-tinged sauce, and the chow fun, which it said had a real Chinatown flavor. Gift-card and delivery listings today point to Mongolian beef, jumbo shrimp, a spicy special pork and egg drop soup as the popular orders. Prices are on the website’s separate lunch, dinner and party-tray menus for each location; the check runs in the $15 to $30 range a head at dinner, less at lunch.
Drink from the list. The family says few restaurants of any cuisine put as much effort into their wine inventory, and the Shea room has a full bar. Ask for the list rather than the by-the-glass card; it is the part of the restaurant the owners are proudest of.
Timing. The Shea room is open 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, and 11 to 10:30 Friday and Saturday. The Pinnacle Peak room opens at noon on Saturday and 11:30 on Sunday and closes a half hour earlier most nights. Lunch is the calm shift and the cheap one. The week of the holidays is the opposite: on Christmas Day both rooms open from 2 to 9 p.m., the restaurant asks for reservations and takeout pre-orders, and, according to Copper Courier’s 2025 guide, the Valley’s Jewish families debate which of the two locations is better. For the wider picture of that tradition, see our note on Jewish Scottsdale.
Book ahead. Reservations run through OpenTable or the phone, (480) 391-0607. Walk-ins work on weeknights; winter weekends and anything near Christmas do not.
Getting there. The Shea center sits on the north side of the boulevard at 92nd Street, a mile east of the Loop 101, sharing its lot and its address with Sweet Republic, which is the dessert plan. Chompie’s and Ling & Louie’s are in the next centers east. The Pinnacle Peak room has the easier parking, on the corner across from Mastro’s, and the newer dining room. Choose by geography; the menus are nearly the same.
From Chinatown to the subdivisions east of Pima
Jade Palace opened at the moment North Scottsdale was being built. In 1996 the land east of Pima Road along Shea was turning from desert into gated subdivisions, and the people moving in wanted the restaurants they had left behind in the Midwest and the Northeast. The Mei family, with a Chinatown résumé and Arizona friends telling them the market was empty, opened a Chinese restaurant for exactly that customer. Howard Seftel, reviewing the new room for New Times in September 1997, got the business plan in one line: find an affluent neighborhood and serve not-too-Chinese comfort food in a good-looking setting. He thought the setting was very pretty in a prosperously suburban way and the food was timid, with appetizers that ranged from awful to blah and main dishes that only occasionally showed flashes of talent.
The restaurant outlasted the review by three decades, which is the real story. P.F. Chang’s had opened its first store at Scottsdale Fashion Square in 1993 and was turning Chinese dining into a national chain; Flo’s opened on Thompson Peak Parkway a year after Jade Palace; most of the other independent Chinese restaurants of the 1990s in Scottsdale closed. Jade Palace stayed, added a second location at Pinnacle Peak and Pima across the lot from the original Mastro’s, and in 2015 was voted Best Chinese Restaurant by New Times readers. In 2023 the paper’s editors gave it Best Canto-American Chinese Food, a category name that is also a fair description: Cantonese technique applied to an American Chinese menu, with a wine list no Chinatown restaurant would carry.
The other thing that kept it alive is the calendar. Chinese food on Christmas is a Jewish American tradition, and the Shea Corridor is the center of Scottsdale’s Jewish community, so Jade Palace became the place the neighborhood goes on December 25. Copper Courier’s annual guide lists it first among Scottsdale options, open 2 to 9 on the holiday, reservations recommended and pre-orders urged. What the record does not say is the year the Pinnacle Peak room opened, the size of either dining room, or whether the 1997 menu’s Steak Kew and Four Seasons survive; the website’s menus are the place to check.
Honest assessment: Jade Palace is a neighborhood restaurant in the most literal sense. It serves the food its neighbors want, in a room they find comfortable, at prices they consider fair, and it has done so for thirty years while flashier Chinese restaurants came and went on both sides of the 101. If you want hand-pulled noodles or a Szechuan kitchen that will hurt you, drive to Mesa. If you want Peking duck and a good bottle of wine on Shea Boulevard on a Tuesday, or anywhere at all on Christmas, this is the place, and it earned that by showing up.