‘GOURMET EXPRESS’ OFFERS A MIXTURE

They ought to bottle this sauce. It’s a neat cross between American barbecue sauce and Oriental sweet-sour, complete with a whiff of star anise, and I could eat anything with it, not just these ribs. We may be seeing an emerging Orange County pattern here, a new sort of East-West blend: a sort of American Diner Revival restaurant, all neon and gleaming white tile, where the menu also has a page of Vietnamese dishes.

Located on a curiously remote-feeling block of Harbor Boulevard (it can probably count on the business of the various foreign auto mechanics who have shops there), Gourmet Express evidently aims to be a sort of multi-cultural fast-food place. The huge menu mostly breaks down to American and Oriental (Chinese as well as Vietnamese), with some quite successful cross-pollination and a residual category of the strange.

The appetizer list gives a fair preview. There are flaky-textured deep-fried calamari (called camora on the menu), a straightforward Oriental egg roll and a surprising East-West wonton: flaky wonton shells fried empty, like a crisp taco shell, before being filled with that old American bridge party favorite--a spread of crab meat and cream cheese.

The Chinese choices don’t announce themselves as such, though nobody is likely to be in any doubt about what to expect from cashew chicken or beef with broccoli in oyster sauce. The curries are Chinese, too, strong on the clove and cumin. The Vietnamese menu is moderately ambitious. There are soups and noodle dishes, of course, but also a number of the things you make into Southeast Asian tacos with lettuce, herbs and pickled vegetables.

One of the best of these is lemon grass beef. You cook it at the table, using chopsticks to manipulate the thin slices of beef on a bulging metal griddle (mounted on a stand that doesn’t quite fit, so the difference is made up by a ragged-looking piece of expanded metal mesh; it works, but don’t tip anything over). The fish sauce you dip your lemon grass beef tacos into is unusually thick and fishy, sweet-sour with plums and surprisingly dosed with hot peppers.

There’s also one of those golden eggy Vietnamese pancakes folded over a mixture of fish, shrimp and sprouts, only with this one, the dipping sauce is the more usual thin, sweet variety with carrot threads in it. Fun to eat. However, I have to say the big specialty of the Vietnamese page, the special baked fish, was a disappointment. It had the muddy, bittersweet flavor peculiar to catfish, though maybe some people have a taste for it. And the fish sauce is correspondingly funky and thick.

The American side of the menu is largely fried meats like chicken and fish and steak (of course, at these prices, the steak is no fancy cut), with the option of Cajun spices--better Cajun spices than usual. The meats come with browned onions and red and green peppers, and lettuce, possibly another Vietnamese touch.

The most interesting items are in the cross-cultural category. The menu says something about a spicy tomato sauce on the “Italian-style fish and chips,” but what I got was a curious, and quite enjoyable, dish of fried fish (floured, not breaded), coated with a thin liquid that reminded me of an orange-flavored Vietnamese sweet-sour sauce.

Some of this cross-cultural stuff is part of Vietnamese tradition after a century of French occupation. On the Vietnamese menu there are several stews listed as coming with French bread--good, fresh-baked small French loaves (one of the neon signs at Gourmet Express reads BAKERY), sliced and buttered. The beef stew would seem to be a Vietnamese adaptation of a French ragout of beef and carrots in red wine. Where in France a local variation on this basic recipe might add lemon or orange peel, this one adds the exotic aroma of lemon grass.

The desserts listed are familiar pastries like a Napoleon, but there didn’t happen to be any the night I asked. Instead, the waitress told me, there were some Vietnamese desserts not listed on the menu. These are definitely for the adventurous, the sort of high-protein Southeast Asian “sundaes” which always surprise Americans because they are sweets based on beans. Why this should surprise us eludes me, though--after all, we’re the nation that flavors its baked beans with molasses. The red beans seem to be easier for most people to take than the yellowish “green beans,” but probably they would prefer the dauntingly grayish, sweet-sour pudding of banana and coconut. These desserts, incidentally, can be ordered hot or iced according to the weather and your taste.

Gourmet Express is very reasonably priced: appetizers, $1.95 to $2.95; entrees, $3.95 to $11.95; desserts, $1.50 to $2.50. Lunch, basically the same as dinner with some items in smaller portions, is $3.95 to $7.95. American-style breakfasts are served at $1.50 to $2.55.

GOURMET EXPRESS 16650 Harbor Blvd. Fountain Valley (714) 531-7183 Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted.