Testing Boundaries
Okay, so John Holly's Asian Bistro in Lone Tree isn't Super Star Asian (the incredible dim sum place at 2200 West Alameda) or the old Mee Yee Lin (another incredible dim sum place that became a merely passable dim sum place with great shu mai and incredible dumpling soup after its move from West Alameda to 2295 South Chambers Road in Aurora last year) or the previous incarnation of Ocean City (1098 South Federal) on its best evenings, when the dining room would fill up with night cooks and bar crawlers and neighbors eating giant pots of anything that walked, swam or crawled, and the air filled with languages as thick and foreign as the smell of five-spice.
Even though chef John Ye's kitchen is doing good work, occasionally excellent work, almost always interesting work, and even though Ye himself is the sort of driven, calculating, completely obsessive chef I respect, John Holly's is not the kind of restaurant whose name I will whisper as I lean across a table, talking to my weirdo gastronaut friends, accenting my hissed pronouncement with raised eyebrows as if to say just go there and now. I'm not holding it up as one of those places where any veteran eater, willing explorer or Big Hungry Boy will experience epiphanies large or small.
