RESTAURANT REVIEW : Meals of Fire, Ice Served at Mandarin Wilshire

Some say this meal will end in fire, some say in ice. Whaddaya say, let’s have both.

If we order the flaming bananas, Roger Lee, former chef of Abacus and the Mandarin in Beverly Hills, may come out and make them beside our table and ladle them onto ice cream with luscious cinnamon sauce, and flames will have licked practically to the Mandarin Wilshire’s ceiling, and everybody in the place will be watching and maybe order the same thing. Or possibly they’ll have the flaming lichis, which I have a little trouble imagining.

Or we can have the ice bowl, a drum-shaped block of ice lit from within so that we can see the orchids frozen inside it. It’s a quieter sort of dessert, simply covered with various sliced fruits, including apples quaintly carved in palm tree or lobster shapes.

Great, I’ve had fun. Nice being with you. Oops, forgot--Mandarin Wilshire, which has no connection with the Beverly Hills Mandarin, is a Chinese restaurant with approximately 143 items on the menu in just about any Chinese style you can think of. Really should try some more dishes.

And since Roger Lee is a famous chef, we should try some of his 20 or so chef’s specialties. Some of these really are pretty wonderful. Dry-fried beef, for instance: string-thin shreds of beef, almost as dry as jerky, mysteriously impregnated with a peppery heat that emerges slowly and insistently. Or “oyster-flavored chicken,” pieces of tender breast that accomplish the marvel of feeling like oysters in the mouth.

Sweet and pungent chicken comes in what the menu says is a “spicy sauce available only in our restaurant,” which is merely the liveliest version I’ve ever had of those red-orange catsup-based sauces. Five-flavored shrimp is in a milder, slightly jellied sweet-sour sauce. There’s an unusual chicken dish with mushrooms and lots of fried pine nuts, but it’s kind of a Johnny-one-note dish--I wouldn’t make an entire meal of it.

Lee clearly wants to please. Sometimes, perhaps, he overreaches a little. There’s a rather elaborate dish called pepper-flavored eggplant where two slices of eggplant sandwiching a layer of pork are fitted into an onion ring, as if it were a miniature barrel hoop. Unfortunately, this construction is deep-fried, and for the eggplant to get done all the slices have to be so thin that the final composition tastes mostly of the frying batter.

And I might be the only person who positively likes pineapple bowl beef, which is exotic in two contradictory directions: Braised beef heavily flavored with star anise, mixed with pineapple chunks and flamed in a hollowed-out pineapple. And maybe there’s been a lack of communication about our crispy duck, which is not crisp but just the plainest, unflavored sort of duck.

The appetizers are great, though. There’s a wonderful steamed won ton with pasta of a particularly luscious texture, in a chile-hot black bean sauce. Also, a superior fried won ton, very crisp and prettily shaped. And a particularly light Mandarin chicken salad, full of crisp rice noodles with just a hint of sweet dressing and aromatic peanut oil. Sushi-lovers can make do with the seaweed shrimp rolls, which are in effect a steamed norimaki roll.

And that brings us to dessert. Fire and ice again, I should think?