New Chinese Eatery May Give Competition Incentive to Improve

The restaurant community is suffering indigestion from news that the ratio between county population and restaurants has sunk to fewer than 500 residents per eatery. That makes for a lot of blank spaces in reservation books.

There have been too many restaurants around for some time, if never too many good ones, and don’t be surprised to see a few major-name closings in the next year or two.

One fixture that recently made the decision to bolt its doors is the Cotton Patch, long a fashionable establishment and, even during the lazy years of its slow decline, a Midway Drive landmark. Only a few local houses rival its 40-plus years in business.

Even with the glut, San Diego always can find room for a good new Chinese restaurant, and many that have opened in the last few years have set standards well above the lackadaisical approaches taken by the majority of long established eateries.

Customers do not automatically gravitate to quality--there is a certain comfort in returning to a place at which the sweet-and-sour pork never varies. But, in the long term, the newcomers may force the older houses to rethink their menus, upgrade service, improve attention to detail and refurbish premises that in many cases have grown regrettably shabby.

The Bamboo Garden in Clairemont seems one of the new places that may, over time, provide the competition with incentive to improve. The restaurant has taken a very ordinary space in a very ordinary strip shopping center and turned it into an informal but brightly attractive room.

The decor depends upon a few artworks and upon aquariums stocked with exotic fish and other sea creajures, which are both easy on the eye and useful in the way they distract little ones impatient for their dinners. (The place seems popular with families, and it is encouraging to think that a child’s exposure to moo goo gai pan today may lead to a young adult eager to explore, chopsticks in hand, the savory mysteries of sea cucumbers and steamed duck web.)

The restaurant also places a higher premium than most on service, another welcome sign of the general changes for the better taking place among San Diego restaurants. Competition never hurts consumers.

If Hong Kong is the Paris of Chinese cooking, Taiwan is the runner-up for elevated cuisine, and Bamboo Garden’s Taiwan-born management takes a generally sophisticated approach to the cooking.

The menu seems abbreviated contrasted with a lot of lists and offers rather little that is unfamiliar. But the choice is sufficient, and the results by and large are pleasing.

Egg rolls head the menu, as they must, and the kitchen treats them as a necessity to be gotten through; they are crisp but unexceptional, and beware the mustard, which seems even more potent than usual.

The almost-as-ubiquitous fried dumplings follow, and these are done with some style; it’s not easy to fill a bland water-and-flour dough with lightly seasoned meat and make it interesting, which this kitchen does. A pre-mixed and rather bland dipping sauce accompanies the dumplings, however, and is disappointing not just for its meekness but for the fact that it robs diners of the satisfaction of mixing their own concoction of soy, gingered vinegar and--drop-by-drop to suit one’s exact taste--crimson chili oil.

Bamboo Garden offers one excellent appetizer that only recently has begun to appear on local menus, steamed won tons with moderately spicy sesame sauce. They are, in a way, very much a Chinese version of ravioli, doused with a sauce that seems pleasantly akin to peanut butter in both taste and texture.

Another first-rate starter, the chicken soong , is a rather austere but enjoyable variation on minced chicken rolled in lettuce leaves. The portion is so generous that it could be regarded as an entree, which with a price tag of $4.25 makes this dish the best bargain on the menu.

The menu also veers a little off the beaten track with the bean-curd vegetable soup and the chicken soup studded with black mushrooms, both of which are rather reserved but elegant.

The house specialties list steps off less than enticingly with a seafood combo served on a sizzling platter; sizzling presentations are not entirely without merit but do seem the Chinese answer to many a tired continental restaurant’s steak Diane.

The pace quickens with the orange-flavored beef, a dish that most places offer these days but which Bamboo Garden gives an especially zesty, definitive flavor. A second excellent choice is the crispy duck, another standard dish done with panache.

In this case, chunks of roasted fowl are plunged into hot oil to give the skin a special crispness, while the meat remains quite moist. The sweet hoisin sauce served on the side is perfect with the duck and reminds us that, even though some restaurants use it like ketchup, hoisin was created with specific and quite appropriate uses in mind.

Besides the house specialties (the frequency with which these lists appear makes them seem marketing ploys as often as not), there are garlic-sauced preparations of shrimp, pork, chicken or beef that have a subtle but pungent flavor and gain interest from the fat slices of onion and bell pepper interspersed with the chosen meat.

The kitchen generally seems to do a good job with beef, and makes a dish of fried, sesame-coated beef that perfumes the immediate neighborhood with the nutty aroma of crisp, hot sesame seeds. The tender beef is further treated to a smooth, savory sauce mildly heated by the inclusion of Szechuan “black paper” peppers.

Lake Tung Ting shrimp may seem bland at first, although it is not--the whole point of the dish is its delicacy and subtlety. Shrimp garnished with mushrooms, broccoli and miniature ears of corn swim in a stock-based sauce thickened with egg white, so much egg white that the sauce seems fluffy and unctuous. This dish needs to be eaten thoughtfully (it is a good expression of low-key Cantonese cuisine) and should never follow a spicy dish.

Among the chicken offerings are orange-flavored chicken, which never used to appear on menus and may be a response to the popularity of orange-flavored beef, and the increasingly popular General Tso’s chicken, which adds deep-fried chunks of bird to a reasonably spicy sauce.

There is a good, long vegetable list that includes braised bean curd, “tangy” string beans stir-fried with bits of pork and a particularly savory spicy eggplant in a rich, thick, decidedly sweet but also hot sauce; this, too, gains extra interest from the inclusion of bits of meat.

Bamboo Garden offers ice cream for dessert, which is a step in the right direction because most Chinese restaurants offer absolutely nothing.

Sweets at the end of the meal are not a Chinese custom, but they are not unknown, and it would be nice to have the option. Fortune cookies naturally accompany the check, and the company that supplies Bamboo Garden employs an unexpectedly intellectual writer. The cookies aren’t bad, either.

BAMBOO GARDEN

4310 Genesee Ave., San Diego

277-9984

Lunch and dinner served daily

Credit cards accepted

Dinner for two, including one glass of wine each, tax and tip, about $20 to $45