RESTAURANTS / Max Jacobson : One of the Real Mysteries of the Orient--Tasty but Rather Pricey

Chinese grandmothers might swoon over a clever young businessman like Michael Kang, but most of the dishes that Kang serves in his Laguna Beach restaurant, Five Feet, bear no resemblance to anything they would have ever seen before. Kang’s food is a combination of performance art, buzz-word ingredients and Taoist philosophy. It is as controversial as it is contemporary.

The fact is, almost everything about this small, ultra-chic, gallery-like restaurant is subject to controversy--even the name, which is rumored to be derived from three possible sources: owner Kang’s height, the height of the restaurant’s sign, or the building’s elevation above sea level. I couldn’t get our waiter to commit.

People either love or hate the restaurant’s warehouse-like demeanor: Art Nouveau on gray brick walls, a Pompidou Center-style jumble of exposed pipes and twisting ducts, classy Deco lights hanging from a high wooden ceiling.

And just try to find another restaurant heady enough to charge a full-price corkage fee for wines already on their list. The food isn’t exactly cheap either; a pretty pastel plateful of kung pao chicken costs $15; that’s about three times what it would cost served on a plain white plate in a more traditional Chinese restaurant.

But consider the novel joys of listening to Anita Baker and Tracy Chapman while picking beluga caviar out of a bed of vegetable-fried rice. Arrogant? Perhaps. Boring? No chance.

As my friends and I approached Five Feet for our first visit, my eyes immediately were drawn to a flash of neon and a pale blue glint of light emanating from one of the paintings hanging inside. It was a cool Thursday night, and steam was pouring from the open kitchen. People with no place to sit were crowded around the doorway; stories we had heard about overbooking seemed very real. But surprise! In less than 5 minutes, the doorway cleared, and our table was ready in time for our reservation.

The waiter came soon, noticing that we had brought our own wine and immediately informed us that if our wines were on the house list, we would have to pay the price written on the wine list for the privilege of drinking them with dinner. Checking the list, we made the lucky discovery that they were not, and settled on a less outrageous $10-per-bottle corkage fee. Nevertheless, I felt as if I had been sold short by Gordon Gekko.

Soon, though, I was in the mood to forget. Appetizers arrived on glazed ceramic plates with rich, warm colors, and looked beautiful. Four servings of warm goat cheese won ton got to the table first, surrounded by perfect slices of apple. They tasted wonderful, but the filling was astonishingly hot: Someone at our table burned her tongue on molten cheese.

Golden cup, minced Muscovy duck breast wokked with pinenuts in a plum-ginger sauce, turned out to be thoroughly delightful--tiny, light and complex. Bangkok beef satay, skewer-size beef in an orange-lime-peanut sauce, was ordinary, though there was a delicious slice of grilled onion on the side. Only the salad, advertised as mixed baby greens and toasted walnuts dressed with sesame-walnut vinaigrette, was a disappointment. It came full of burnt pine nuts, no walnuts, far too much dressing and a mealy, sliced tomato.

But the tomatoes were not mealy with the second course, blackened yellow-fin tuna with marinated English cucumber and luscious vine tomatoes, which had a firm, juicy texture. Everyone except me seemed to think the dish was a stroke of genius, because of the “complexity and contradiction” (the pretentious name that the restaurant has chosen for it) of flavors. Still, it struck me as something I had had before at Santa Monica’s Chinois on Main, a restaurant many like to compare with this one.

I don’t think that’s a good comparison: Some dishes may be similar in spirit, but I find Chinois and Five Feet vastly different. The chef at Chinois, Kazuto Matsuzaka, is Japanese, as are many of his inspirations. The only things Japanese about Five Feet are the lacquered black chopsticks and service plates which have become a cliche in contempo Oriental dining circles. To its credit, Five Feet is an original, a clone of nothing, and most of what the restaurant serves has real character. Despite the presence of raspberries, radicchio, goat cheese and other things Chinese cooks wouldn’t go near, the food at Five Feet manages to come off as oddly Chinese.

We confirmed the Chinois-Five Feet differences as we dug into main courses. The restaurant’s signature dish is 5’0” sweet and sour catfish, and the fish is as soft and fragrant as it is possible for catfish to be. All four of us positively devoured the crispy skin that had been drenched in a tasty red sauce--piranhas couldn’t have done much better. Sonoma lamb Mongolian-style in a scallion-mint sauce was so tender I tried to cut it with chopsticks.

My dish was veal a la Szechuan-Mex, and although the meat was superb, the dish failed. The sauce was too pungent, and the flavor of the meat totally disappeared. Much better is boneless quail grilled with shiitake mushrooms, wax beans, snow peas and Roma tomato on two-color fettucine tossed in a spicy papaya, ginger, and basil sauce--I poached several bites off a neighboring plate.

The four of us could hardly manage half of what was on our plates. Perhaps that is why Five Feet can be so expensive. Then again, there seems to be a great demand for this artfully experimental Chinese cooking, but the supply appears rather short. Until the Chinese restaurant community realizes this on a meaningful scale, continue to expect to pay $5 to $10 for appetizers, $12 to $24 for main courses, and healthy mark-ups for wines, even if you bring them along from home.

FIVE FEET

328 Gleneyre St., Laguna Beach

(714) 497-4955

Open 7 days for dinner only, 5-10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 11 on weekends. Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted