A Chinese Restaurant That Offers Variations on Stereotyped Standards

Chinese restaurant menus in San Diego County relentlessly and remorselessly duplicate one another, a situation that poorly serves diners who would experiment with unusual dishes if given the chance.

That so many menus dedicate so much space to kung pao , sweet and sour and moo shu dishes may lead to impatient finger-drumming among would-be adventurers through la cuisine chinoise . The saving grace is that all of these are open to interpretation, and some cooks do in fact employ their woks as testing grounds for what can be rewarding variations on otherwise set themes.

The new Mandarin Dynasty in Hillcrest has a rather prototypical Chinese restaurant name, and a correspondingly prototypical menu of the sort that proprietors evidently have come to regard as “safe” for Western audiences. The kitchen does not perform in any standardized manner, however; some dishes are boring and some merely acceptable, but others ring such changes on familiar dishes that the results seem like new and wonderful creations.

Deeply Subtle Dish

The happiest example may be the twice-cooked pork, which has become standard since the swift and overwhelming popularization of Szechuan cooking (and also of cooking that is mislabeled as Szechuan, since the term often is employed erroneously to encompass hot dishes drawn from other schools of Chinese cuisine). For this moderately spicy but deeply subtle dish, Mandarin Dynasty cuts pork tenderloin, bamboo shoots, tofu and onion into uniform rectangles and cooks them together with a few peppers and a nicely seasoned brown sauce. The trick is in the appearance; all the bits look the same, but each has a slightly different texture and a decidedly different taste.

The shrimp egg rolls also offer a nice variation on an all-too-typical theme. Instead of the frequently soggy egg rolls encountered these days (the truth is that many, many restaurants, including some good ones, now serve commercially prepared versions), these are small, reed-like and crisply delicate, the shrimp filling untroubled by extraneous ingredients and happily shrimpy in taste. Mustard and plum sauce arrive on the side, but both detract from the delicacy of the basic product; the relish-like arrangement of shredded vegetables in sweetened vinegar that garnishes the plate is, on the other hand, perfect for the egg rolls.

The menu also offers kung pao in a variety of basic treatments (shrimp, chicken, beef and so forth), but the best of these is listed separately under a “chef’s suggestions” heading that also mentions a couple of other good choices. The kung pao “three flavors” combines whole scallops with diced chicken and slivered beef, and dresses them with a moderately spicy brown sauce highlighted with garlic, ginger and the trademark peanuts whose crunch gives kung pao its essence. The kitchen handles this dish with particular care.

Most Unusual

Another chef’s suggestion, the “snow flower” shrimp, is not only a tasty dish but the most unusual on the menu. It is probably unique in San Diego, and may be throughout Chinese cooking, since it calls for milk and butter. Dairy products are virtually non-existent in ethnic (Han) Chinese cooking, since the Chinese traditionally have been understood to be allergic to them. (That ice cream is catching on in major Chinese cities makes this long-accepted truism somewhat questionable, however.) The dish consists simply of shrimp in a creamy white sauce colored with peas and scented, perhaps, with what seems the faintest touch of ginger. The overall effect is beautifully delicate, and the dish seems, in fact, like nothing so much as a Chinese shrimp Newburg, which may indicate that cooking can transcend cultural differences with greater ease than any of the other arts.

The menu runs on through several pages, with much repetition of style and few other dishes that sound out of the ordinary. The appetizer list is straightforward and dull, with the exception of the shrimp egg rolls. The teriyaki beef, borrowed from Japanese cuisine, should be returned there posthaste, since it is coated thickly with a heavy and unlovely sauce. The pan fried dumplings, on the other hand, are finely done, the pasta-like wrappers chewy and flavorful in the odd way that fried flour paste can be, and the minced pork filling savory and rich.

Among other dishes, the chicken Phoenix is a rather standard rendition of sliced fried chicken breast dressed with a mild sauce and vegetables, and is chastely bland but satisfying in its way. What the menu lists as “dry sauteed shredded beef,” a name that suggests a particularly succulent and hard-to-find preparation made with fragrant air-dried beef, is actually an exact copy of the “crispy beef” served by many San Diego restaurants. This toss of batter-coated beef slivers, carrots, celery and sugary sauce is pleasant enough, but nothing more.

Stringy Texture

The crab meat with “double mushroom” (fresh cultivated mushrooms and Chinese straw mushrooms) was a hard dish to call. The crab had a stringy, almost gooey texture and a “fishy” flavor that would make it unacceptable in Western cooking, although this strong flavor may be exactly what is sought by Chinese cuisine. The possible lesson here is that authenticity sometimes is rather more than we desire.

The restaurant makes a special effort in the vegetarian area, and several tofu-based dishes that imitate meat are available by request. Among these are “imitation chicken” in black bean sauce and “imitation beef” kung pao . Some of the others listed on the standing menu are meatless moo shu (a natural, since moo shu consists of mixed shredded vegetables to which any or no meat, fowl or fish may be added) and yu-shiang eggplant, which cooks this meaty vegetable in a thick, spicy-sweet and thoroughly delicious brown sauce.

Chinese restaurants usually pay little or no attention to dessert, except for the ubiquitous and utterly Western fortune cookies, and Mandarin Dynasty largely follows suit. It will sometimes serve fried patties of coconut pudding on request, however, and, although these are garishly decorated at the corners with unnaturally red cherries, they are also subtle and enjoyable.

* MANDARIN DYNASTY

1459 University Ave., San Diego

298-8899

Lunch and dinner daily

Credit cards accepted

Dinner for two, with one glass of wine each, tax and tip, about $20 to $40