RESTAURANT REVIEW : Plum Tree Inn’s Pleasant, Only Mildly Exotic

“Eeeoo,” said the fifth volleyball star. “I’m not eating any of that. I dissected those things in biology. No way. Eeeoo.”

I had thought maybe I owed the volleyball team an educational experience. Exoticism-wise, though, I could about as easily have taken them to a deli, so I had dared them to try sea cucumber.

Now, the new Plum Tree Inn on Wilshire is a remarkably pretty restaurant, in a manner as far removed as possible from the Cantonese cliche of red and gold and dragons. It’s full of light and air, dreamily decorated with pastel banners and a high-style wacky geometry much like Pinafini or the lamented Max au Triangle: undulating columns, friezes of bent red pipe, steps leading nowhere, pyramid facades, odd boxy shapes. People seem to like it.

But there’s not much from the wild side here. The food is mild and richly flavored and not at all demanding of tender palates. A lot of dishes have a gravy that my mother could have made. It’s probably significant that the Plum Tree doesn’t even set out chopsticks, only forks and spoons.

I suppose I’d just gotten a craving for something from the wild side when I ordered sea cucumber.

The team was already perfectly happy with a really quite good chicken salad, full of lots of red ginger and the pleasantly leathery texture of fried won ton strips on top, even though the greens were nothing more exotic than iceberg lettuce. They weren’t bothered that the spiced Chinese cabbage, sweet and slightly sour and very faintly hot, was rather coleslaw-like.

Then I dared them to try sea cucumber. One by one they did. But now the platter was getting lukewarm, and the fifth volleyball star, ordinarily a rather fearless person, was still bridling. She had begun to speculate about exactly how many thousand dollars she would consider accepting for the indignity of eating sea cucumber. I took her point. Sea cucumber is, well, unlovely. It doesn’t taste at all bad--in fact, this one scarcely had any flavor at all, apart from the sauce with its exotic whiff of tide-pool aroma and faint crunch of tiny shrimp eggs. But I’m afraid it looks like, and has pretty much the texture of, thick, waxy slabs of barely cooked beef fat.

It’s really pretty good, I tried to tell her. Why didn’t I just finish it myself? she wanted to know. Well, the truth was that, like every item at the Plum Tree, the portion was rather large--larger, I suspect, than anybody ever eats of sea cucumber. She didn’t buy this for a second.

I pointed out that she liked everything else we had ordered. I tried to dwell on the lobster in black bean sauce, an exceptionally good one flavored with nothing but ginger, fermented black beans, and the inspired sweetness of fresh peas. I brandished the pan-fried noodle with shredded pork, a little salty but very pleasant, doused with beef gravy and vegetables, and the Plum Tree Special Chicken Strips, which come on a sizzling hot plate with snow peas and baby corn cobs, broccoli and paddy mushrooms in a lightly garlicky and ginger-scented sauce.

And then there were the more pungent dishes, mostly made with those Chinese sauces based on doctored catsup, like sweet and pungent chicken, which seems to add honey to the sauce, or Plum Tree beef, with its dose of tangerine peel and red pepper, the beef apparently having been deep fried before cooking in this sauce.

I dwelt shamelessly on the unexotic. The mushu pork: somewhat ersatz since it had no lily blossoms, not even any bits of egg, being just big, generous Oriental burritos full of pork and shredded mushrooms with sweet plum sauce. I feinted with the lamb dishes, which seem hard at work to conceal the flavor of lamb altogether--Hunan-style lamb could be veal in its sauce of black beans and leek greens with the odd blackened pepper pod. I pointed out the pleasantness of the rather limited dessert list, which consists of nothing but ices (the green tea and coconut varieties were most popular, though I considered the red bean underrated).

In the end, the last volleyball star ate some sea slug anyway. She closed her eyes fiercely while she chewed, but when it was over she confessed that it wasn’t so bad, with the expression of someone who has been violated and is surprised not to have died in the process. One last half-hearted “eeeoo” escaped her lips.

Plum Tree Inn, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., West L.A. (213) 826-8008. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Beer and wine. Validated parking on McClellan Drive. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $27 to $70.

Recommended dishes: spiced Chinese cabbage, $5.75; barbecue chicken salad, $6.95; lobster with black bean sauce $18.95.