Restaurants Explore Chinese Cuisine, Including Spicy Dishes

The proliferation of Chinese restaurants in the Clairemont and Kearny Mesa neighborhoods remains a source of wonderment.

Each of the last few years has witnessed a significant number of openings, and although there must be a saturation point beyond which failures will begin to occur, it does not as yet seem to have been reached.

In many ways the increased competition is good news for consumers. The menus at most places, both old and new, have expanded to include many dishes that formerly could be found only in Los Angeles and San Francisco. For example, the peppery flavors of Szechuan and Hunan, once paid scant attention by San Diego’s longer-established Chinese houses, have become commonplace at these newer establishments and are available in wide variety.

Just as with a fortune cookie, however, there is more to this situation than readily meets the eye. The menus tend to imitate one another vigorously, so that as one travels from place to place one encounters more of a variety in quality than in selection. And not every restaurant offers good or even acceptable food, which indeed is a development for a city in which it once was as difficult to find really bad Chinese cuisine as it was to find the very best.

Another development of recent vintage is the introduction of the “all you can eat” luncheon buffet, which by offering mass-produced food kept warm in cafeteria-style serving pans militates against the essential Chinese principle of freshly prepared food served sizzling from the wok. Many restaurants offer this questionable buffet (creating the illusion of convenience for the clientele, while really making things easier for the kitchen), but the problem is that at some places, soggy leftovers from the buffet find their way into dishes served at the dinner hour. The results, predictably, are awful.

The panda makes its home in Szechuan province, and the Panda Inn (4455 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., 270-3930) seems to have an especially sure grip on the complexities of this region’s cuisine.

A branch of the Panda Inn in Santee, this restaurant recently opened in handsomely redecorated quarters that offer a relatively sedate and restful atmosphere. The quietly attentive waiters seem to enjoy their work, and can be helpful in designing a dinner that takes best advantage of the menu’s many offerings.

The kitchen does so good a job with Szechuan cooking that it is tempting to order a meal that concentrates solely on these spicy-hot dishes. To do so would be a mistake, though, because the Chinese sense of balance wisely demands that a meal include as many different tastes and sensations as possible. Thus even a bland dish, such as the chicken with snow peas or the shrimp in lobster sauce, can be desirable when the dinner emphasizes Szechuan preparations.

The most stellar offering here may be the Panda beef, a dish of some complexity in which the play of textures competes with the play of flavors. Beef, first braised in a pungent liquid to make it both tender and flavorful, is sliced into ribbons, coated with batter and fried until crunchy. When ready, it makes a second visit to the wok, this time to be stir-fried with tiny hot peppers, shreds of dried tangerine peel (for aromatic bitterness), a dash of syrup (for a unifying sweetness), and other seasonings.

The yu - hsian chicken downplays (but does not eliminate) the heat in favor of an emphasis on aromatic qualities, which it derives from a variety of spices and roots. The flavor is clear and sparkling, and the result quite savory, despite the fact that the shredded chicken meat plays mostly a background role that stresses the other flavors over its own.

Other meats and seafoods may be had in yu-hsian style, or in the hotter kung pao style, which also includes a garnish of crisp peanuts. Other interesting Panda Inn offerings include the crispy duck, the roasted whole fish in meat sauce, and the savory pan fried noodles. Most dishes are priced from $5 to $7.

The House of Chinese Gourmet (4957 Diane Ave., 279-2520) can be lively on a weekend night, when families and large groups crowd into the place and keep the staff running at a double-time pace.

Smaller parties may find the service a bit slow, but the food usually is worth the wait, especially if the dinner includes one or two of Chinese Gourmet’s Hunan specialties. These dishes are hot, but not so stridently as their Szechuan relations--the spices seem designed to clarify the preparations’ other flavors.

The Hunan “triple treasury,” which combined scallops, shrimp and abalone with tiny ears of corn, pea pods and artfully carved strips of carrot, had an unusually fresh and delicate flavor that would have seemed quite Cantonese were it not for the piquant hints of spice that gave it a gentle bite. A deeper, equally sophisticated medley of tastes pervaded the Hunan pan-fried noodles, a rich dish of long, elegant noodles, shrimp, barbecued pork and sliced chicken, all coated with a richly flavored brown sauce.

Chinese Gourmet does its own version of Panda beef (here called orange flavored beef), which is a little less zesty but still quite good. A particularly refreshing dish that makes a good companion to spicier foods is the fried chicken with lemon sauce, in which a thin, lemony sauce coats juicy strips of batter-fried white meat.

This restaurant’s appetizer list is no more adventurous than its competitors’ (which is to say that it goes no further than it has to), but the egg rolls can have their moments, particularly when teamed with the Shanghai-style red ginger sauce that makes a pleasant change from the ubiquitous sweet plum sauce served elsewhere.

Most entrees are priced from $5.25 to $7.25.

The Imperial Palace (4805 Convoy St.; 569-0600) occupies very spacious premises that used to house a Mexican restaurant, a predecessor whose spirit lives on in some of this establishments’ decorations.

A recent meal led to the speculation that the restaurant also had saved some of the recipes prepared by the kitchen’s former cooks, because most of the dishes tasted as if they had been cooked by persons who had only a passing acquaintance with Chinese cuisine.

The menu itself is handsome enough. Running to many pages, it includes hundreds of dishes, among them several that are hard to find in this area. But the kitchen does not seem to know how to cook many of them.

The hot and sour soup, for example, had an odd taste that stemmed from an unidentifiable source and made it most unpalatable. Nearly every Chinese restaurant in town serves this soup these days, and this was the first time in memory that a truly unfortunate version was sampled.

A certain greasiness pervaded both the Mongolian beef (a stir-fry of shredded beef and scallions and a few other ingredients--the very height of simplicity) and the kung pao pork, which in addition to being too moderately seasoned was made from very fatty meat. Even the fried rice that accompanied the entrees savored of grease.

Apparent pre-cooking quite spoiled the shrimp in bird’s nest, which otherwise could have been quite an interesting dish. The “bird’s nest” itself, an edible container fashioned from shredded potato fried between two wire baskets, was stale, soggy and quite inedible. How different it would have been if freshly cooked, and why was it not? The filling, too, seemed quite tired; the broccoli that garnished the shrimp, for example, was nearly mushy, an almost unheard-of state for a vegetable in a Chinese restaurant.

Most entrees cost from $4.75 to $7.25.