RESTAURANT REVIEW : Unraveling a Chinese Puzzle

It’s a Chinese restaurant! It’s a Franco-Chinese restaurant! It’s . . . well, I guess Abacus is really just a Chinese restaurant, mostly.

A rather unusual Chinese restaurant, to be sure; an elegant and spacious-looking place of sweeping lines and cool shades of pink that could pass for a high-ticket European hotel lobby with tables set up in it. (There is a quiet little private dining room that feels serenely Oriental, though.) You would never guess you were on the second floor of a mini-mall on Wilshire Boulevard.

True, the sound track is soothing European classical music, sometimes segueing into soft rock, and the tables are set with knife, fork and spoon--and chopsticks and rice are optional. True, there’s a reasonably serious wine list, and the entrees tend to be heavy with meat, and the fortune cookie is unknown.

Ignore all that. And ignore the mixed-green salad, full of the usual California mixed greens, the plate garnished with both a marigold (edible and very California) and a crunchy bit of white fungus (Chinese, but exotic and therefore very California). Basically, what’s going on is Chinese.

The star appetizer is Peking duck, one of the very best versions around because of a very authoritative plum sauce: concentrated and assertively flavored, almost bitter. Though the catfish popcorn sounds Cajun, what you dip the chunks of fried catfish in is a sweet black-bean sauce. There are giant shrimp rolls--prawns in won ton wrappers.

The rest of the appetizers are even a bit on the obvious side. Calamari in blond breading with a sweet peppery sauce. The usual pot stickers (very generous with the meat filling, though). Greasebomb-style stuffed eggplant: thin eggplant slices encasing a bit of ground pork, thickly coated in batter and deep fried.

The entrees are served in a French sort of way, in large portions with lots of meat in lots of sauce, and the menu is not organized in the notorious laundry-list manner. The grilled veal chop, for example, comes in a cornstarch-thickened brown sauce with whole cooked garlic cloves in it that doesn’t appear on anything else.

The filet mignon has a very pleasing but thoroughly mysterious sauce that may not appear on anything else in the world. It’s apparently neither a Chinese bean sauce nor a European wine sauce, but something with a hint of sweetness, possibly of caramel.

There is a lamb shank--not a very common item in Chinese restaurants, but good and tender, served in one of those floury Chinese-style curry sauces that smell a little like maple syrup. Duck is sauteed with leeks, it says here on the menu, but the meat has also been fried quite brown first, giving it a flavor a little like ham.

The most impressive dish has a name that sounds like Pritikin food: steamed butter fish. In fact, it’s richly sensual, thick slithery flakes of fish in an extremely delicate sweet-and-sour sauce. Is it Chinese? I haven’t a clue.

But the rest of the menu is definitely familiar Chinese items. A lobster special in a catsup-like sauce, a little hard to winkle out of the shell (how would they expect you do to this with chopsticks rather than a fork?). Kung pao chicken that is sort of a way of eating peanuts, unless you actually bite down on one of the few pepper pods. Straightforward salmon in black bean sauce.

The biggest surprise is the desserts, which are exceptionally good for a Chinese restaurant. The cream cheese cake is unexpectedly like a Boston cream pie, a slightly lemony cream filling between layers of pound cake. There is a chocolate cake with a strong cocoa flavor.

The best dessert is dismayingly called almond tofu. It turns out to be an impossibly delicate almond-flavored gelatin, surrounded with a lattice of kiwi and raspberry sauces, that dissolves--practically evaporates--in the mouth like a dream.

So there, fortune cookie.

Abacus Chinese Restaurant, 11701 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; (213) 207-4875. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; 6-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 6-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Full bar. Parking lot/valet parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$66.