RESTAURANT REVIEW : Roads to All Asian Cuisines Lead to Orchid’s

Not to be just any Asian restaurant but a hip, ‘80s California sort of Asian restaurant--that’s Orchid’s dream. It has food from all over East Asia, chopsticks only on demand, no MSG in anything and a ceiling of exposed ducts and beams.

I suspect I may already have wrung the last drop of ecstasy from seeing struts and air ducts over my food, and by this point I’m almost ready for an acoustic-tile revival, but at least it’s done well here. The orchid-colored ducts are actually entertaining; they end in concentric registers that make them look like a sucker-footed extraterrestrial about to stomp us all into hot-and-sour soup.

If there’s a problem with Orchid, it’s that one restaurant is not likely to do equally well on all the cuisines it essays--Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay and Indonesian--and in any case, these cuisines all involve different eating habits. At Orchid, though, everything is dished up the same: with lettuce, shredded red cabbage and an orange slice.

So there you are with your order of Vietnamese lemon grass pork, topped with sliced ginger and delicious crisp-fried onion. But where’s the other stuff that always comes with Vietnamese food--the vinegar and the fish sauce and the hot sauce? You can get vinegar with sliced ginger in it if you ask, but there probably ought to be a pile of fresh herbs too.

The biggest victim of this standardized service is the Korean barbecued beef. It’s nice and charcoaly, but the essence of Korean food is the side dishes. Without at least some radish salad and cabbage kim chi on hand, this could be barbecued beef from anywhere.

The cuisine that comes off best, and in the most surprising ways, is Chinese. What greater cliches could there be than shrimp toast and chicken chow mein? But at Orchid, the shrimp toast is not that rather English appetizer of toast spread with shrimp paste, but several large shrimp, each inside a big square of wonderfully crunchy breading. And instead of being a heavy stomach filler, the chicken chow mein is clean and refreshing with raw green onions and smoky bits of grilled chicken.

Indonesian ba-tung beef and Thai shrimp curry are both pleasantly spicy dishes with coconut flavoring (the Malaysian mango chicken, though, is not saved by its coconut--it’s mawkishly sweet). And there’s an appetizer of hot squid that has its points, notably fried green onion rings and a sweet, garlicky fish-flavored dipping sauce that would be welcome with a couple of other dishes. This is not the place to come for mee krob , though. The fried noodles aren’t very puffy and are badly mixed with the tomato-heavy sauce.

Hip and ‘80s though it means to be, dessert is not Orchid’s strong suit. There’s a nice dish of fresh fruit (kiwi, raspberry, mango) with coconut cream and shaved ice (possibly not the best idea in the weather we’ve been having), and sometimes there are French pastries that are made elsewhere. I’m kind of glad the place has always been out of the egg pudding with mung beans. I might not be hip enough for that one myself.

Orchid, 37 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena; (818) 796-8787. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Beer and wine. Validated parking in the Schoolhouse parking structure across Fair Oaks. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22 to $36.