A few years ago, every reviewer in and out of town hailed Fort Lauderdale's Rainbow Palace as the greatest and most elegant of Asian restaurants and the true paradigm of Chinese cuisine for Broward County.

I have enjoyed wonderful meals there in the not-so-distant past. All others were challenged to meet the celestial standard raised by the ``Buddha's delight'' on East Oakland, but on the night I visited, the Buddha would have been better off with take-out from somewhere else.

I don't know what happened to The Rainbow Palace, but it ain't what it used to be. While the mossy green stucco walls -- partitioning glass-block screens, glowing dragon-red light spheres and verdant carpet -- are still in place, everything is looking a little long-in-the-tooth. The service, once gracious and accommodating, is now hurried and somewhat deceptive. The food, once the finest of Hong Kong, Hunan and Szechuan cuisine, is decent at best. The prices, however, are still quite extraordinary.

A LUKEWARM START

A steaming bowl of wonton soup ($6), a light chicken consommé scattered with shredded carrots, a few wisps of roasted pork and two small, tasty pork dumplings, wasn't much better than the neon yellow, oil-slicked version available at most noodle houses. Country Roast Duck ($14), said to be ``a boneless quarter,'' amounted to a few slim strips of heavily salted duck fat and slightly crisped skin. While there wasn't anything disagreeable about the lightly spiced soy-based flavor, the scarcity of meat for the price was. The petite pile of Hunan Popcorn Squid ($14), attractively speckled with thin rounds of fresh green jalapeños and diced red onions, was admirable for its light and greaseless tempura-like coating, but was strangely similar to its namesake in texture.

One of the tricks that waiters, prompted by their managers, like to play is to slip into the list of ``specials'' some outrageously expensive item without mentioning the price. The item in question was a $40 piece of lobster, which we did not order. Another special of Chilean Sea Bass with Chinese vegetables ($30) was ordered and though perfectly fried and nicely matched with a subtle cornstarch-thickened lemon sauce, the vegetable-accompanied chunk of firm white fish was nothing out of the ordinary.

Orange Beef ($22), with its marvelous interplay of tastes and textures, is one of my all-time favorites. Here, however, the six narrow strips of dry, leathery beef were nearly inedible, and the sauce, though pleasantly contrasting the sweetness of the Grand Marnier with the heat of red pepper, did nothing to salvage this once grand dame of the Asian world.

SIX FLAT SCALLOPS

Scallops in Hot Pepper Sauce ($27), another ``classic,'' was just as disappointing. The six sad scallops were tough, chewy and curiously flat, but the dark, blistering goop in which the discs were drowned was even sadder.

Chef's Lo Mein ($17), thin, unusually fragile noodles sautéed with strips of chicken, pork and vegetables (shrimp, too, but we chose to omit them), wasn't bad, but the portion wasn't worth the price tag.

The Chinese kitchen, in general, produces some wonderful dessert possibilities, but the Rainbow's kitchen produces none at all. All desserts are decidedly Occidental (cold, dry slices of German chocolate cake, Key lime cheesecake, white chocolate mousse cake), made elsewhere and definitely not worth the six bucks.

Perhaps this was just an off night for the Rainbow Palace, perhaps the regular chef was out, perhaps all the dishes really weren't as mundane, meager and immoderate as the three of us opined. Perhaps, but when the bill arrived to reveal that we had been charged $2 for each shot of flat soda that had been refilled into our glasses, we felt that that this wasn't a quick summer storm but, perhaps, the end of the ``royal house.''