RESTAURANTS / MAX JACOBSON : 3-6-9 Shanghai in Anaheim Is Full of Chinese Flavor

A good number of the more authentic Chinese restaurants in Southern California can be found in the San Gabriel Valley. Now, at long last, a little bit of the San Gabriel Valley has surfaced in Orange County: 3-6-9 Shanghai, one of that area’s best Chinese restaurants, has opened a branch in an Anaheim shopping mall. Along for the ride are nearly all the wonderful cold dishes, handmade breads and savory dumplings that made the original restaurant such a hit.

3-6-9 Shanghai makes no attempt to be Western. It is your basic, brightly lit, Formica table-top, Chinese-style roadhouse cafe. Lily Liu, 3-6-9’s owner, is from Taiwan, but both her mother and father were born in Shanghai. Liu learned to cook at an early age, and many of the dishes on her menu are family recipes.

Most of her customers zero in on those wonderful breads and dumplings. And inside the glass deli case are several cold dishes--exotically spiced meats and vegetables--which Shanghai cuisine is noted for. Perhaps the best known is wine-marinated chicken. 3-6-9’s version is mild and flavorful, one of the easiest dishes to eat I know of.

Other options include Liu’s pomfret fish, which she smokes with tea leaves and sugar. The result is a grainy, slightly sweet fish--much different than the saltier smoked fish with which most Western palates are familiar. Liu also smokes chicken, using a strongly flavored dry-textured preparation that I found almost overbearing. Cold-pickled vegetables--cucumber with red chile or oil-soaked braised baby bamboo shoots, for example--make good accompaniments for the meat dishes.

The dumplings, 10 to an order, make an ideal second course. Indeed, 3-6-9’s Shanghai steamed dumplings, fat little pockets of dough that burst with juice when you bite into them, are among the most irresistible dishes I have ever run across. The filling, minced pork with spices, is soft and dense. Dip the dumplings in rice vinegar and hot chile oil, then eat them with sliced fresh ginger.

Boiled chive dumplings are another terrific variation, perfect for vegetarians. The green-tinged, diaphanous pouches are filled with eggs, chives and watercress.

Among the breads is something called fried sesame roll, actually a pan-fried onion bread studded with white sesame. It’s wonderful. Then there is the million-layers cake, which the waitress will tell you is “Chinese pizza.” It looks like a cinnamon roll without the frosting, and you pull the layers out from the middle as you eat it. It’s an oily, simple bread that goes perfectly well with the restaurant’s vinegary, meat-rich hot-and-sour soup.

There are several hot pots and noodle dishes. These don’t show off the restaurant’s best cooking, but they are generally fresh, honest and well-prepared. The best is steamed pork with rice powder--lean, tiny smoked pork ribs coated in pulverized rice, braised and served atop a bed of steamed pumpkin. The dish, outrageously cheap at $2.95, is served in a bamboo steamer.

I would also try to squeeze in some smoked pork with green garlic (the “green garlic” turns out to be leek, a veritable mountain of it, in fact).

The roast catfish with garlic is delicious. But the infamous surimi , artificially flavored pollock, is substituted for crab in the otherwise appealing seafood soup. And fish head casserole, normally a staple in Chinese kitchens, was so oily I couldn’t eat it.

There also is a problem with monosodium glutamate (MSG) at this restaurant. The kitchen here seems to use it liberally in the cooked dishes. Ask them not to. That’s the one aspect of authenticity most of us can do without.

3-6-9 Shanghai is inexpensive. Dim sum and dumplings are 50 cents to $4.25. Soups are $3.25 to $4.25. Cold dishes are $2.95. A la carte entrees are $4.95 to $9.95.

3-6-9 SHANGHAI RESTAURANT

613 N. Euclid St., Anaheim

(714) 635-8369

Open Monday through Thursday 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Friday through Sunday until

10 p.m.

Beer and wine license pending

Cash only