RESTAURANT REVIEW : Encino Version of Mon Kee Leaves One Hungry for the Original

The original Mon Kee was the first Chinese seafood restaurant in town that non-Chinese diners seemed comfortable in, and it quickly won itself an adoring public. It’s still one of the better restaurants in Chinatown, for my money. Then it began to expand, and one generation and a couple of not-so-successful spinoffs later, there’s a Mon Kee in Encino.

I first dined there on a weekend when the restaurant was jammed to the rafters. Despite a cluster of people waiting at the door, my reservation was honored promptly. But then we were seated in a noisy corner of the busy dining room, where we proceeded to wait almost 15 minutes before anyone came by to acknowledge us.

It was during this waiting period that I noticed a startling thing. Dishes were coming out of the kitchen one at a time! The better Chinese kitchens have five or six woks working efficiently at all times, but that is clearly not the case at Encino’s Mon Kee. The dishes I ate (when they finally arrived) proved the point. None of them tasted as if they had been prepared by a seasoned chef.

What makes this particularly lamentable is that the Encino Mon Kee has so much potential. It’s a pretty place, a soft, almost cozy earth-toned room with French windows. The servers, though somewhat raw, are certainly eager to please. And the ingredients are of the highest quality, ranging from absolutely fresh fish to plump asparagus and a silken, first-rate tofu. Now the place needs someone who prepares these ingredients with a delicate touch.

That may be too much to ask. One of the biggest reasons that this food is rarely good outside Chinese neighborhoods is the reluctance of top Chinese chefs to stray from the nest. Often an enterprising Chinese restaurateur will hire a top-notch, well-traveled chef for a suburban restaurant, only to lose that person shortly thereafter. The top Chinese chefs, it seems, prefer to play to a more familiar--or perhaps more knowledgeable--audience.

The first item under the section titled “chef’s special recommendations” is an egregious example of the kitchen’s flaws. Lobster with butter and onion sauce is a lobster plucked live from the tank, pan-fried and served in the shell (at a hefty price, $16 per pound) on a large platter. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Then you bite in. The sauce has been thickened with cornstarch to an almost pudding-like consistency, ruining the delicacy of the flesh and generally spoiling your appetite. Ditto for the live crab, smothered in a sauce so shiny you can practically see your reflection in it.

Fresh steamed fish is another disappointment here. A tender sole came in a puddle of bland soy-based sauce, with a few tired green onions that had lost their perfume arranged rather hastily on top. Apart from the pungent flavor of fresh onions, the dish lacked the shreds of fresh ginger that Chinese diners love to mingle with the sweet taste of fresh fish. It’s obvious that the chefs here have tried to Americanize some of the recipes to play it safe.

That would be easier to take if they accomplished the task with more skill. Sweet and sour pork, for one, should be a burnished red color; it’s a pallid orange here, a cloying, flavorless preparation. Even more to the point, the appetizer section is filled with those awful retro-Chinese appetizers we ate in the ‘50s: leaden battered shrimp, dry and tasteless barbecued pork, greasy egg rolls that, in my case, actually came from the kitchen still cold.

You get all these hideous appetizers together, if you wish, on Mon Kee’s combination platter, a dish that sets back authentic Chinese dining at least 30 years. Has Mon Kee compromised by opening a restaurant so far away from a Chinese community? Of course. Just try to find such a ghastly aberration of the Chinese kitchen in the Chinatown Mon Kee.

There are a few bright spots, if you have the patience to ferret them out. The squid with spicy salt is delicious, properly crispy and fragrant. Vegetable dishes such as hot braised string beans and sauteed asparagus with black mushroom are basically fine, as is a selection of crisp noodle dishes with assorted toppings (although the latter tend to be on the oily side). And at lunch, the generous portions of kung pao chicken, bean curd with Sichuan sauce and various beef dishes are good values.

I might have been more easily satisfied in this restaurant, but I guess I expected more. A good name goes only so far before it starts to work against itself.

Recommended dishes: spicy kung pao chicken, $8.50; sauteed asparagus with black mushroom, $9.95; hot braised string beans, $7.95; pan-fried bean curd with mixed seafood, $9.50.

Mon Kee, 17337 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 788-7272. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily; dinner 2:30 to 9:45 p.m. Sunday through Thursday; 2:30 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Full bar. Parking lot at lunch, valet parking at dinner. American Express, MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $50.