Mandarin Cove Covers Familiar Ground, and Some of It Very Well

Does complaining about a Chinese menu that lists just 110 dishes identify you as an impossible-to-please whiner, or does it suggest that you have had your fill of “An Introduction to Chinese Cuisine” and would like to graduate to the more advanced courses?

For whatever reason (one deeply suspects the sake of convenience), few Chinese restaurateurs seem interested in offering more than a bare-bones selection of preparations.

This becomes galling when you consider the immensity of the Chinese repertoire and learn about the giant Hong Kong restaurants and their North American offshoots (several are located in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park), whose many-paged listings of exotica read like toothsome novellas. To the eyes of San Diegans who never get to try any of this fancy stuff at home, these menus read like inviting but impossible fantasies.

Coves A-Poppin’

Downtown La Jolla, which has a large stock of eateries but rarely numbers more than one major Chinese house and can go for long periods without any, recently had its supply replenished by the opening of Mandarin Cove. (The increasing number of Coves in La Jolla would astonish cartographers. In addition to Mandarin Cove, which does not have a view of La Jolla Cove, there are Top O’ the Cove, George’s at the Cove and the Upstairs Cafe at the Cove, all of which do have water views.)

Mandarin Cove is somewhat post-modern in its look, pretty in pink and greenish blue, the rooms divided by smart glass-block partitions and the bar area lit by neon squiggles and swirls. The menu likewise is post-modern in the sense that it incorporates all the dishes that other restaurants have demonstrated to be proven sellers, and ignores the rest. If you were to enter Mandarin Cove starving for chilled jellyfish or braised sea cucumber, you would leave quite famished.

There are, however, plenty of familiar dishes, most of which have been available since the first Cantonese cafes opened in San Francisco in the past century. The rest have become commonplace since the popularization of Szechuan cuisine in the late 1970s--it might even be said that Szechuan is the Cantonese of our era. But even among the Szechuan listings, we find nothing beyond such typical offerings as hot sauteed shredded beef, assorted kung pao dishes and strongly seasoned bean curd.

Thus the menu is replete with egg rolls, won ton, barbecued pork and spareribs, the dreaded po po tray (assorted tidbits arranged around a kitschy open flame) and pot stickers, these last a relatively recent and quite welcome addition to the litany. Chinese dumplings frankly seem nicest when steamed, but the pot stickers, which are browned after the steaming, have their merits, too, and Mandarin Cove served juicy specimens that seemed happy with their dipping sauce of chili oil, soy and vinegar.

If the appetizer list sounds like the opening bar of the same old song, it is. The soup section offers up egg flower, hot and sour, won ton, sizzling rice, crab meat with asparagus and the festive if fairly flavorless shark’s fin, and the various entree subheadings are thick with sweet and sours, moo shis , chow meins and the usual fried rices.

Playing It Safe

The impression given is that the management has studied marketing reports and played it safe; since so many people do order sweet and sour pork (and chicken and shrimp) and moo shi beef (and pork and chicken and shrimp), why bother to offer them anything different? The bottom line for any restaurant is, of course, essential, but there does seem to be an obligation to educate the public that is going unmet.

Given the menu it has, Mandarin Cove turns out some remarkably good dishes as well as some genuine disappointments. The seafood soup sounded promising but was quite bland, except for a slightly fishy flavor and an occasional hint of fresh ginger. (There were a few shreds of it in the tureen, and more would have been welcome.) The chunks of crab and shrimp had a squishy texture that seemed in keeping with the glutinous texture of the egg white-thickened broth.

General Tso’s chicken, a Szechuan dish that has gained much currency in the past decade, can come alive with its contrasts of tender meat in a crisp coating, and its simultaneously sweet, pungent and spicy sauce. Mandarin Cove achieved the correct effect with the sauce, but the chicken lost its texture somewhere along the line and seemed like nothing so much as the style of fried chicken that, after it has been crisped, has been set to steam in water--an odd and mystifying trick performed by many home cooks.

A Peking duck fell in the middle range, which is to say that it was good but not exceptional. The bird arrived already carved, which was a tad disappointing (as consolation, the garnish included a carrot sculpted to resemble a bird in flight), and the waiter opted to compose the duck, plum sauce, scallion and pancake rolls himself, a job that some diners regard as a treat. The duck skin was reasonably crisp if not brittle and the flesh tender if a little greasy, and it was overall a sufficiently pleasing dish. (This also is substantial, and a party of two would want to precede it with nothing more than a soup or appetizer.)

Mandarin Cove showed off, however, with a really fine rendition of Mandarin lamb, a succulent stir-fry of small lamb medallions in a savory brown sauce sparked with a subtle range of seasonings. The kitchen did just as well with the sauteed scallops in garlic sauce, a moderately hot dish made pungent by its mahogany sauce of chili oil, soy, scallions and much slivered garlic. This was a brilliant sauce in its way, and the scallops had been treated in a manner that responded to it by being ever so lightly dredged in starch and fried just until the coating crisped--the scallops themselves remained plump and juicy.

There is a slight variety in the dessert category, a part of the meal generally ignored by Chinese restaurants since Western sweets are, after all, Western. The selection consists of a trio of ice creams, of lychee, mango and red bean. The mango has a good flavor, as mango almost must (it has been described as the fruit of Paradise), but try the red bean, which is sweet yet earthy and entirely unlike anything at Baskin-Robbins.

Mandarin Cove does not yet have a liquor license. Patrons may bring their own beer or wine, however, and the restaurant charges $2 for wine glasses.

MANDARIN COVE

1299 Prospect St., Suite 105,

La Jolla

456-9500

Lunch and dinner daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including tax and tip, about $20 to $45.