Far East Way Late : Some Asian Restaurants That Reawaken in the Wee Hours

Several weeks back we did a feature about late night dining here in Orange County and came to the conclusion that the scene was pretty lively.

We didn’t explore its more exotic dimension, though, namely, our Asian restaurants. That’s a whole story in itself.

Anyone who has ever been to Asia, with its densely populated cities and bustling street life, has marveled at the sheer numbers who dine out late there. Whether in cafes, at night markets, street stalls or behind dimly lit curtains, Asians simply love to eat in the wee hours. So you may not be surprised to learn that the Asians in Orange County are no exception.

This is a world-class area when it comes to cultural diversity, and that awareness redoubles after hours. That’s when many of our Asian restaurants are at their most colorful, alive with laughter, conversation and the spirit of faraway lands.

The food in these restaurants tends to be as authentic as it gets; the operators cater to a largely native clientele and therefore do not compromise much to account for tastes.

Westerners can expect to be a minority when dining at one of these restaurants, much like being on vacation in an Asian capital. In a way, this is like visiting Asia, so think of yourself as a foreign guest. You will most likely be treated as one.

I was. In most of the following restaurants, I had so much fun I forgot I was still home. So if you find yourself in the mood for an unusual dining experience after a concert, a movie or even to liven up an otherwise unmemorable day, here’s the good news: The entire Orient is yours to travel after hours, and the only visa you might need is plastic.

China

Choy’s Restaurant. “Amazing,” I heard a group of American-born Chinese (ABCs, as they call themselves) exclaim at a nearby table, “a place like this in Orange County.” As a longtime fan of some of the more obscure late-night haunts in L.A.’s Chinatown, I could relate to their enthusiasm.

Because Choy’s Restaurant, a boxy green room crammed with round wooden tables made even more claustrophobic by its too low, industrial drop ceiling, has the same exact feel of a big city, after-hours noodle house. The surprise here is that they cook almost everything besides noodles, on a wide-ranging, bilingual menu that offers home-style cooking at its best.

On the wall, there is a large, Chinese-language-only menu. If you can’t read it, you might miss the real late-night foods Chinese love: jook, a rice porridge with a variety of toppings; you tiu , a fried cruller that is dipped in the porridge; various tripe dishes (such as menudo , for those who have had too much to drink), and vegetables such as gai lan , Chinese broccoli, or choy sum, mustard greens, heaped onto platters and topped with tangy oyster sauce.

There’s actually an easy way around this problem. Just tell the waitresses you want porridge, a cruller, tripe, or Chinese vegetables; they do know that much English. Then tell them what kind of preparation you want (soup, porridge, sauteed and with what meat). That’s all there is to it.

One Chinese dish not to miss is the porridge with salted egg, one of the most soothing late light meals anywhere. Choy’s salted egg tastes like an exotic, overripe cheese, and just a tiny bit flavors a whole bowl of porridge or soup. Another Chinese specialty not to miss is bitter melon, a pleasantly bitter, bumpy squash, sauteed with your choice of pork, chicken or beef.

Sit at one of the simple, clean formica tables and be patient. Service here is friendly but often overextended. (Large groups of 10 or more seem to love it here.) Excellent dishes from the bilingual menu include clean tasting fried rices, pork chops sauteed in garlic and chili pepper, Chinese steak with orange peel and dried pepper, crispy fried chicken and wonderful wonton soups. Hong Kong? Who needs it.

Choy’s Restaurant, 2801 W. Ball Road, Anaheim. Open Wednesday through Monday from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Closed Tuesdays. Cash only. (714) 527-6848.

Thailand

Captain’s Place. The fun-loving Thais like to be entertained when they dine, as anyone who has ever been to Bangkok can attest. What makes Captain’s Place so colorful is the live entertainment. It’s almost like being in a nightclub on Bangkok’s Patpong Road, full of Thais letting loose, curious Westerners and heavily painted waitresses who look slightly wearied by all the hubbub.

It’s easy to spot this restaurant at night; there are always a cluster of cars surrounding it in an otherwise empty parking lot. You’ll hear it too, thanks to a duo of girl singers accompanied by a noisy elecric piano, belting out hits in fluent Thai or fractured English (hey, Paul, I wanna marry ewe!). Sometimes, it might even be somebody from the audience who gets up to sing.

The dining area is long and narrow, with a 35-foot banquette that heads straight into the stage. You sit at glass-topped tables garnished with silk orchids, the Thai national flower. Most of the Thais gather around the stage, the better to snap their fingers and boogie with the music. I’d advise sitting as far away from the stage as the law allows. Unless you know a lot of Thai songs.

The food here tends to be a bit milder than it is in Thailand but hotter perhaps than in the more Americanized Thai restaurants. The kitchen specializes in seafood, but there is the whole rainbow of curries, red, yellow and green, to go along with whatever you would like. Red curry, a pasty, steamy sauce, makes a good match for oily meats like duck, or try green curry with any seafood. The yellow curry tends to be watery here, and the least memorable of the three.

The menu is loaded with interesting appetizers like tod mun , Thai fish cakes flecked with green bean and red chili, and crab balls, wrapped in tofu skin and dipped in a mild plum sauce.

There are plenty of the more familiar dishes, like the good house paht Thai, fried, flat noodles eaten with bean sprout, crushed peanut and scrambled egg. Paht Thai is the classic late-night dish in Bangkok, where you can see it served in sidewalk stalls until 4 in the morning. This version is a winner, with all the ingredients mixed together, exactly the way they do it over there. I guess they figure their customers are too distracted or disabled to do the mixing themselves.

Captain’s Place, 8552 Beach Blvd., Buena Park. Open from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., Thursday through Sunday. All major cards. (714) 995-6560.

Japan

Gourmet Kitchen. An eccentric, hard-to-find sushi bar always jammed with regulars, this place becomes more like a private club than a restaurant when midnight strikes. And it’s so much fun you’ll probably stay until closing time.

Sushi is ideal for late-night dining simply because it is so light, but Tomoji-san, the owner and sushi man, has lots of his own ideas. If you ask for him to do omakase (literally, chef’s choice) for you, there’s no telling what you’ll get.

He started me and a friend off with bite-size shrimp in a Cajun mayonnaise that frazzled the tongue, continued with a whole Spanish mackerel on a platter, head and all, drenched in a vinegar sauce, and then worked up to a huge scallop salad with wasabi (green horseradish) dressing and tobiko (flying fish roe). He would have gone on all night if we hadn’t cried “uncle.”

The reason the restaurant is hard to spot is due to that maddening tendency the Japanese have to play with the king’s English. The restaurant is near a Carl’s Jr. in a large mall on the northwest corner of Sunflower Avenue and Bristol Street, but the sign on the building reads SUSHI-HEALTHY PLACE. You have to get within squinting distance of the door to see the real sign, in tiny neon letters.

What makes it clublike is a wide assortment of diversions, from a dart board to a sweets bar with terrific homemade chocolate chip cookies to laser karaoke , the new technology sing-along where you grab a mike and make a fool of yourself while the words come up magically on a 35-inch video scene. I got to sing “Great Balls of Fire,” and was nearly given the bum’s rush.

The restaurant stays open until 2, but the last call for sushi is usually around 12:30. Besides the usual array of eel, sea urchin and other Japanese tidbits, there are numerous hand rolls, chazukes (a rice soup made with hot tea and topped with cooked fish or meat) and creative dishes like the sushi pizza (baked rice and seafood topped with a broiled cream sauce.

After your late-night dinner, content yourself with beer, wine and sake, while singing your head off to the hundreds of laser disks in their collection. If that’s not your scene, at least stay for the chocolate chip cookies.

Gourmet Kitchen, 3940 S. Bristol St., Santa Ana. Open until 2 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday, until 1:30 a.m. Sunday and Monday. Visa/MasterCard accepted. (714) 241-7115.

Vietnam

Thien Thanh. The neighborhood known as Little Saigon is arguably the liveliest place in the county after midnight, with dozens of little restaurants and cafes open to serve pho (the long, slippery soup noodles that Vietnamese people eat nearly every day), filter coffee in gleaming metal pots and big slices of its vibrant cultural life.

My favorite restaurant there is Thien Thanh, literally “thousand blue” in Vietnamese, an allusion to the ever blue skies of the Vietnamese homeland. It’s a real crossroads of cultures.

It’s also quite a looker. The design is among the most wonderfully garish you’ll ever see, with a mondo bizarro lipstick red floor and bright blue tables. The restaurant looks like one of those posters Peter Max designed during the late ‘60s. Ironically, that’s precisely when Vietnam became a household word in this country.

There’s always plenty of loud pop music and a whole spectrum of people in this restaurant, but it is consistently good food that remains the biggest draw.

The one dish I’d come back for again and again is garlic centered beef, an extra tender New York steak blackened on an iron grill. It’s cooked medium rare, with a hollow center that has been stuffed with cloves of garlic, and it tastes just fabulous. I only wonder why I don’t see it elsewhere.

Fans of cha gio , the famed Vietnamese egg roll, will be pleased to hear that this restaurant does one of the best jobs with it of any place. These peppery, bite-size cylinders are an epiphany of minced pork, crab, celery, carrot and clear noodle thread, and have a fresh, clean zing. Eat them Vietnamese style, in a lettuce wrapper enlivened by fresh mint and aromatic parsley. They’re addictive.

Don’t miss cua rang muoi here, either: cooked, salted crab in its batter-fried shell. The shell cracks easily, and you dip the meat into nuoc mam , the sweet fish sauce that Vietnamese eat with practically everything.

Then wash it all down with sua hot ga , an orange-flavored milk soda whipped up with beaten egg. Or that good, strong filter coffee. That’ll keep your eyeballs glued to the center stripe on the way home.

Thien Thanh, 5423 W. 1st St., Santa Ana. Open after hours on Friday and Saturday only until 3 a.m. All major cards. (714) 554-7260.

Korea

Kyung Dong. Korean food is mentioned last here because it is probably the most demanding cuisine to eat after hours. Korean food is intense with pickled, fermented vegetables, heavy with garlic and chili and full of robust meats. It’s a powerful cuisine for hardy people, whose country is cold and harsh much of the year. And it is rarely delicate.

So when you walk into Kyung Dong, a large, wood-beamed room with lots of black vinyl lounge chairs (like you see in Vegas), prepare to be overwhelmed by the scent. Koreans are busy grilling meats at the table at these hours, cooking them on table-top braziers under large metal hoods to suck up the smoke. It doesn’t all get sucked up, either.

But the food here does taste pretty good. No matter what you order, you will be presented with nine little vegetable dishes, kim chee (pickled cabbage), potato salad, marinated spinach and others, which you can immediately start working on to fire up your palate. A choice of marinated meats such as short ribs, sliced beef, chicken or pork will be brought out on a platter and you can begin barbecuing them yourself, the sooner to eat with your rice and cabbage soup. There’s something almost primal about this food, but it’s definitely an acquired taste.

There are a large variety of prepared dishes to choose from as well, should you not wish to do tableside cooking. Bi bim bap , a hot-iron kettle of rice with shredded vegetable, raw egg, meat and red chili paste, is absolutely delicious. You do need to cook the egg in it, but that’s all, mixing the whole thing up to make a filling one-pot dish. The rice gets all crispy on the sides and becomes a real treat. Just make sure you don’t touch the kettle yourself.

Much of the rest of the menu is appealing, too: thick soups in heavy broths, chive stuffed pot stickers and barbecued fish such as corvina, from the bass family. You’ll need a strong stomach to read through this menu completely, since Koreans often translate the names of their dishes quite literally. (Witness names like cow’s foot soup and beef guts in spicy sauce.) And always, always think twice about bringing a vegetarian to a Korean restaurant. Especially after hours.

Kyung Dong, 9628 Garden Grove Blvd., Garden Grove. Open daily until 2 a.m. Visa/MasterCard accepted. (714) 638-7001.