RESTAURANT REVIEW : Chinese Menu Offers 126 Different Dishes, but Kitchen Does Best With the Simple Ones

How many Chinese restaurants in the Valley serve shredded pork ear with hot sauce or stewed sea cucumber with shrimp eggs? Not many. Serious Chinese restaurants are few and far between in these parts.

But here’s Yang Chow in Canoga Park with the same ambitious menu as Michael Yung’s original Yang Chow in Chinatown. We should all give three cheers. Well, two cheers, anyway; it’s good, but not quite as good as the menu might make you think.

It’s a bright, spacious, pleasant place, with clunky red booths lining the walls and etched glass room dividers adding a slightly Oriental feeling to what is otherwise a rather Western-looking room. Oddly, it still feels like a new restaurant, even though it has already been open for eight months. (Maybe it’s time they remove the good luck plants traditionally displayed on opening day.)

The waiters move about briskly, rolling up mu shu crepes, ladling soup into bowls of sizzling rice and displaying impressive conversational skills. Yung’s mother, who actually doesn’t speak any English, is the one with an eagle eye for customers in distress. She doesn’t miss a trick, all the while looking stylish in a gray Mao jacket.

So far, so good. What comes out of the kitchen is a different story. There are 126 dishes on the menu, and most of them look inviting in print. Some live up to your expectations and more, but others just don’t work at all. This is a hard menu from which to order.

It may help to remember that Yang Chow ( Yangzhou in the official Chinese spelling) is actually the name of Yung’s hometown, a city of canals on the Yangtse River northwest of Shanghai. The city has its own cuisine, a spicier version of Shanghainese, with lots of seafood, dumplings and cold appetizers.

The best stratagem is probably to proceed as if in a Shanghainese restaurant, beginning with dumplings. Or rather, because they take about 20 minutes to prepare, order dumplings and have some of the cold appetizers, which are rather like Chinese cold cuts, to tide you over. The jellyfish, corned pork and wine-marinated chicken are all delightful and can be ordered together on the three-delicacy combination platter.

That famous shredded pig’s ear, a crunchy, gelatinous appetizer in a hot sauce of memorable bite, is also among the cold appetizers. It will probably please most of your friends as long as you don’t tell them what it is.

Then your dumplings should arrive. I’m partial to the steamed kind, but here the pan-fried dumplings far outperform the “Yang Chow juicy steamed dumplings,” which are not juicy at all. The fried ones are crisply browned, moist and flavorful, a perfect foil for the restaurant’s superb chunky chili sauce. They are worth the wait.

Yang Chow/Shanghai custom is a help up to this point, but be careful when ordering from the section called Yang Chow specialties. Gen. Tseng must have lost a war or two to have had a chicken dish named for him. It’s a misbegotten mess of rather ordinary chicken in chili sauce on pieces of oddly sour sauteed bamboo.

Velvet shrimp is another dish from this section you’ll want to miss. The velvet in the name is supposed to refer to a feather-light sauce made from egg whites. The actual dish is more like an oily shrimp omelet.

Simple is best here. If it is shrimp you want, go for the sauteed baby shrimps, actually rather plump, medium-sized ones perfectly cooked in rice wine. Braised lion’s head, the Shanghainese version of the spicy meatball, is fatty braised minced pork with Chinese cabbage in a brown sauce, and you can’t go wrong with it. Dry sauteed string beans, starred to indicate hot and spicy, is possibly the restaurant’s best dish, a symphony of chili, minced pork and outrageously fresh green beans.

Yang Chow is surprisingly adventuresome at lunch because many good dishes, the ones marked by red pyramids, are unavailable at dinner. Chinese spaghetti with hoisin sauce is one, a delicious pasta dish with a sweet, complex flavor. Noodle in broth with pork chop is another, a typical northern Chinese lunch with a spicy, breaded, pan-fried pork chop atop a mountain of plump noodles.

It may have its flaws, but Yang Chow does offer a broader selection than your average Valley Chinese restaurant. It beats driving to Chinatown, too. Two cheers, for sure.

Recommended dishes: corned pork, $5.95; pan-fried dumplings, $5.25; sauteed baby shrimps, $9.95; dry sauteed string beans, $6.25.

Yang Chow, 6443 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Canoga Park. (818) 347-2610. Open every day from 11:30 a.m., Sundays through Thursdays to 9:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays to 10:30 p.m. Full bar. Parking in lot. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25-35.