Yummy Café is in the old Cinemacafé building. Any of you guys remember that place? It only lasted about a year and probably wasn't ever that good of an idea in the first place, but it had its moments. You went to see a movie that you could just as easily have rented for five times less, you tried to find a seat on one of those precariously too-dark-to-see-how-clean-it-was couches, and then you waited for a server to crawl over to you and take your order for food you were expected to eat during the film.

That's when the space was turned into a pretty exceptional kitchen.

Since that time, we've seen restaurants go in and out of there (the new Solana Center curse, anyone?). The most recent restaurant is Yummy Café, a Chinese restaurant owned by the same people who run Wok next to Big 5 on Cerrillos Road.

One of the hardest things to find in this country is real Asian food. If you're lucky, you might come across it in San Francisco's or New York's Chinatown. In Santa Fe though, it just isn't happening all that much.

The problem with Americanized Asian cuisine is that we all want more meat, more sweet and less flavor. You aren't going to find deep-fried chicken with heaps of sugar and three or four pieces of carrot calling itself sesame, cashew, orange, pineapple, or whatever else outside of America. We've turned an ancient, traditional cuisine that most other Asian cuisines have roots to into something ridiculously unhealthy, full of starches and other crap. We find ourselves eating all of this and worrying whether or not there's any MSG in it when we should be worrying a little more about how much corn syrup and flour there is. Most of us don't even know what "dim sum" is.

Walking in to Yummy Café for the first time seemed like déjà vu (I'd gone to the other places that preceded it). It had a bar-like area on the left that never really looks like it's being used. An assortment of tables and booths are placed pell-mell around the large front room. Oh, did I mention that originally this place was a firehouse? This explains (at least, partially) why there's a glass wall. I think it's supposed to work like a garage door or maybe the back door of an SUV, but I haven't got a clue whether it's functional.

On my way there, I got a call from a friend asking me what I wanted to order. My faint attempt to argue that I didn't even know what was on the menu didn't go over so well. Apparently we were cutting it short for lunch, and they were closing. I was given a few choices over the phone by my friend, all sounding like pretty regular Chinese dishes: cashew, Szechuan, orange, etc. I stopped my friend by opting for the Szechuan chicken, a regional dish known around the world.

Lunch was served bento box style (rice, cabbage with orange puree, a couple of crab rangoons — it seems every Asian country had this idea at the same time).

At best, I've got to say, the food was ordinary. My Szechuan chicken was really sweet, and I believe the only vegetables were sliced daikon radishes, which didn't really fit. The cream-cheese-filled wonton wrappers were about as good as you could ask for.

A friend got a sizzling-rice soup. Rice that appears to be deep-fried gets poured over a broth filled with veggies and chicken. The result is that it sizzles when it first gets poured in — kind of cool. Afterward it's just mushy. I thought the soup was bland. I could taste the chicken broth, but as soon as I added the fried wontons that were also brought out, I was left with something strangely mimicking matzo-ball soup. By the time it was served into a couple of small bowls, there was nothing left but broth and decomposing rice. It needed more of everything — meat, veggies, etc.

What it comes down to, I think, is not that the meal was done badly or that the food wasn't as good as it could have been. It's really just that what we call Chinese food these days is moving progressively further from what it should be: simple, fresh ingredients made with simple recipes. And it should taste good.

All in all, I was unimpressed, though I have yet to be impressed with any Chinese food in this city. The highlight was the fortune cookie.

Zerach Wieder, 17, has graduated from Santa Fe Community College. You can reach him at zerock123@hotmail.com.