Shangri-La: A Sumptuous New Outpost of Chinese Cuisine

The newest of the sumptuous Hong Kong style-restaurants is not in Chinatown or Monterey Park. Shangri-La can be found at Boylston and 3rd streets.

You can’t miss it. Neon signs banded around the top of the low, curving building announce this outpost of Chinese cuisine. Inside, the view of the surrounding high-rise structures makes a striking backdrop to the midday fleet of dim-sum carts.

Aside from dim sum, Shangri-La specializes in seafood. The best dish that I encountered was a striking presentation of skewered shrimp taken fresh from the restaurant’s tanks, cooked, and doused with dark garlic sauce. The sauce was wonderful to eat with the accompanying bowl of rice noodles.

Plump shrimp daubed with mayonnaise and paired with crisp, sesame sprinkled candied walnuts offered an interesting play of textures. And a collection of seafood--shrimp, scallops and sea cucumber--heaped in a potato basket was fine. So were deep-fried flounder slices seasoned with spicy salt--although what the restaurant means by spicy salt escapes me. I’ve had two dishes with that ingredient--the other was sliced pork loin--and neither was what I would call spicy.

I’m not an oyster fan, but I loved a dish of braised oysters. The plump mollusks were spooned sizzling onto a hot platter and topped with a fruity dark sauce. Crisp on the outside, they were mellow and tender within.

A Chinese friend admired the simple perfection of a steamed whole small tilapia and liked a soup made with whole shark fins and chicken. It takes special skill, he said, to cook the fins so they don’t fall apart in shreds. The soup came in a small, covered pot and included a portion of fin and a bony chunk of chicken that the waitress divested of meat with chopsticks. The broth is dark and murky but full of flavor. This is not a pretty dish.

Looks are not generally disregarded here, however, and the kitchen can turn out colorful platters of food. Stir-fried spinach with garlic and Chinese sausage, for example, came ringed with orange slices, their aroma released by the heat of the platter.

I’ve had a few failed dishes here as well, including tough slices of boiled geoduck and an odd dish that combined tender scallops with leather-hard slices of sea conch.

The only problem I’ve had with dim sum was being seated in a non-smoking area and waiting in vain for the carts. The waitress explained that the area had been set aside for customers ordering from the full menu. (No smoking, no dim sum?) On other days, I went through quite an assortment, including velvety beef balls, steamed buns filled with chicken, pork or lotus paste, crunchy browned squares of shrimp toast and a lotus leaf-wrapped bundle of sticky rice mixed with lotus seeds, Chinese sausage and barbecued pork.

I loved hom shi gok , a thick, faintly sweet, rice flour cake stuffed with meat and fried until golden brown. And I enjoyed the impromptu language lesson imparted by “fungus pork in rice noodle.” There was no fungus inside the wrapper. The word simply sounds like a Cantonese word that describes a filling composed of pork, shrimp and vegetables.

Most of the dim sum is $1.60 a plate, with higher prices for special items. The restaurant has a fax-a-lunch menu with prices for main dishes ranging from $5 to $6.50. The selection sticks to such familiar items as beef with broccoli, kung po shrimp and sweet and sour pork. Dinner menu prices are higher. The steamed small tilapia is $10, the shark’s fin and chicken soup is $18, and the shrimp on skewers cost $16 a pound, plus $2 for the accompanying rice noodles.

Shangri-La Chinese Seafood Restaurant, 313 S. Boylston St., Los Angeles. (213) 250-2288. Open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.-9:30 p.m. American Express, Visa and MasterCard accepted. Validated parking in rooftop garage (enter on 4th Street).