RESTAURANTS / Max Jacobson : The Shock of <i> Frozen </i> Fish at a Seafood House Is Overcome by Its Flavor

Eeeyyyaaahhh. The steamed whole fish was frozen .

Chinese chefs prize steaming fresh foods above all other cooking methods; steaming a frozen fish is almost sacrilege.

But last Saturday night at Ten Hu, an Anaheim Chinese seafood house, five of us, including two former Hong Kong residents, were informed that our rock cod would not be fresh that evening.

Ten Hu has a large Chinese clientele; enough of one to merit a separate but unequal Chinese menu on the back page, entirely in Chinese characters. In many restaurants, that translates into the chef saving certain delicacies for favored customers. “Sometimes we have fresh fish from the market,” a waitress told us, “but our Chinese customers grab them.”

Well, we liked the fish anyway. The chef steamed it with ginger and garlic to a pungent sweetness, and the flesh practically melted away from the bone, almost as if it were fresh. Still, it lacked the delicacy of fish straight from the tank.

Ten Hu has a spirited, authentic Cantonese menu and is a decent Chinese restaurant. It doesn’t compare with restaurants in Chinatown or the San Gabriel Valley, but that shouldn’t put you off from a visit.

The dining room is rather stark, salmon pink except for several brassy wall ornaments. Bright overhead lights glare. Tables huddle closely together in the best Chinese tradition. On weekends, the room is nearly always full. And one tiny corner tank by the kitchen door overflows with small crabs and rock lobster. In this Chinese restaurant, even the shellfish struggle for space.

Ironically, the best thing I tasted at Ten Hu was not a seafood dish at all, but soup: winter melon soup with shredded chicken. The winter melon, a large green melon squash with a light, clean taste, can be gigantic, sometimes 30 pounds. The Chinese love to serve these at banquets, often carving out the center and cooking a soup inside. Here, the chef dices the melon into cubes and makes a rich soup from minced chicken, with some smoky Chinese ham thrown in. At $4.50 for an enormous bowlful, it’s remarkable.

Less remarkable but worthy of mention are more familiar choices. The shrimp dishes here are fine, particularly the misnamed “fried shrimps Sichuan.” The shrimps are pan fried with rice wine and diced green chili (not Sichuan but purely Cantonese), and have a simple, straightforward appeal. Fried clams with black bean sauce, a Chinatown standard, has just the right amount of zip, and the fresh-tasting clams are salty and tender.

Among the better non-seafood items are fluffy deep-fried tofu, golden brown cubes of tofu with a soy-green onion dipping sauce. Spicy salt pork ribs--deep fried, bone-in hunks of pork--still sizzle when they arrive at the table. The tofu is not on the English menu, but you can cue the waitresses with the word fluffy . The ribs have a tendency to be slightly fatty but taste great, crackling when you bite into them.

Ten Hu is also one of the only Orange County Chinese restaurants that serves chow fun , the mouth-watering, flat rice noodle that blends so well with spicy sauces. Sate beef chow fun is fiery and exotic, with hunks of braised beef marinated in Indonesian spices. Black bean sauce chow fun has green pepper and chili, dry braised beef and noodles sticky from the iron griddle. Singapore-style chow fun has shrimp, chicken, and beef in a dry curry spice mixture.

I’ve had cooking here, however, that’s been distinctly unremarkable. Scallop in bird’s nest reads well--sauteed scallops and winter vegetables in a deep-fried potato basket--and it looks even nicer. But the scallops are absolutely tasteless, and the potato basket might as well be cardboard. Peking duck is another disaster. The skin is fatty, much fattier than it should be, and the accompanying buns taste like Wonder bread.

Now, about that Chinese menu. A small foray into it can yield some surprising dividends. Many dishes on it are basically familiar. Gai lan loong lay kao (sliced, sauteed rock cod) substitutes gai lan (Chinese broccoli) for the blasphemous Western broccoli you get with the English menu version. The only thing that distinguishes Peking spareribs, a Chinese menu staple, from the more banal sweet-and-sour spareribs on the English menu, is a more pungent, less cloying sauce. Ong choy (a leafy vegetable that translates as “hollow bean”) is sauteed in a light garlic sauce; it’s the best vegetable dish the restaurant serves. If the waitress tells you the restaurant has run out, try batting your eyelashes.

Ten Hu is moderately priced. Family dinners with retro-Chinese standbys like almond duck and chicken chow mein start as low as $4.95 per person. Egg foo young, chop suey, and sweet and sour dishes (for which there are no Chinese characters) are $3.50 to $6.50. Soups are $1.75 (egg flower) to $35 (shark’s fin). Main dishes are $4.50 to $20. Hot pot dishes are $5.95 to $19.

TEN HU

315 S. Magnolia Ave., Anaheim

(714) 826-9910

Open Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday until 10 p.m. Closed Monday.

MasterCard and Visa accepted.