RESTAURANT REVIEW : Delicate Shanghai Specialties in an Opulent Setting

Upscale Chinese is a tough sell, especially in restaurant-rich Los Angeles. Most of us think in terms of cheap and casual whenever it comes to Chinese restaurants, and our wealth of good little cheap/casual Chinese places goes a long way toward maintaining the status quo.

That’s the only reason I can think of why Harvest Inn, the swankest Chinese restaurant ever to hit downtown Glendale, is not playing to a packed house every night.

True, it’s still rather new, open around two months, but you’d think more people would have discovered it by now. With its high style--and high ceiling--it would seem to have everything needed for success: striking decor, careful service, wonderful food and competitive prices. Maybe the name Harvest Inn is part of the problem. I must say I half expected to find New England boiled dinner on the menu.

When you walk into the elegant, relaxing dining room, your eyes are immediately drawn upward, to that high ceiling. It’s a Post-Modern masterpiece, almost 20 feet high, with a pyramidal structure of wooden beams projecting down for several feet.

The main floor is impressive and vast, almost big enough to ride a horse around in. As a matter of fact, it’s carpeted in rich moss green, the color of healthy turf at a race track. You sit at plush booths with dark banquettes, embroidered in a Chinese fan motif, and listen to the mercifully quiet music of the pi - pa , or Chinese zither. Across the room, catch a glimpse of the well-dressed Chinese families, dishing up mysterious delicacies in the semiprivate banquet rooms. They’ll be too busy to notice you.

Chances are, it’s because of the Shanghainese specialties they are eating. Shanghainese is the dominant cuisine of this restaurant, and that means, in principle, lots of cold dishes, seafoods and light sauces. Both the owner (late of Shanghai Winter Garden on Wilshire) and the chef (a man named Chung who was recruited from Paris) are Shanghai natives, and the spirit of their cuisine runs the gamut of this menu. But you’ll also find dozens of Cantonese and Peking-style specialties on their thoroughly bilingual menu.

Hot and spicy dishes are noticeably absent. If you crave hot food, you’ll have to rely on extra spoonfuls of the chef’s homemade chile paste, which you’ll find in little glass vials on every table. I think that does this chef a disservice, though. His food stands on its own.

Bypass the hot appetizers, mere clones of the usual Cantonese cliches (egg roll, shrimp toast), and head right into those Shanghainese cold dishes. Vegetable goose, made of rolled tofu skin stuffed with bamboo and minced mushrooms, is marvelous. It gets its name merely from a resemblance to the cooked neck of a goose, not any similarity of taste to goose, and chef Chung’s version is the best I’ve had in the United States.

Wine-marinated chicken, flavored with loads of garlic, rice wine and Chinese liquor, is also terrific, though admittedly not to everyone’s taste. The chicken is chopped and cooked to a degree somewhere in the no man’s land between sashimi and medium rare, and the faint tinge of blood, still present, may put some people off.

You can’t go wrong if you order from the section titled “Harvest Inn Specialties.” The very first listing is a hybrid of French and Chinese: oyster baked in French sauce. It’s an absolute must. The chef bakes oysters in the shell with a delicate garlic butter, then finishes them with shallot and cilantro. They are so rich I recommend you limit yourself to one--but you have to order a minimum of six. Bring friends.

Also from this section, anything called sweet and pungent is recommended. This means a light batter (and I do mean light) with a hint of coconut, and a sweet vinegar-infused sauce that is never cloying.

That’s the thing about this food that really impresses me. Most Chinese chefs simply do not take the time to reduce their sauces, but instead cut corners with lumps of cornstarch. This chef obviously disdains that method.

A dish such as his sliced fish in special wine sauce with garlic is a good illustration of his style. Slices of fresh sole and shreds of tree ear mushrooms virtually float in a sweet wine sauce that clings like a satin dress, but leaves no aftertaste.

You might also try anything with black bean sauce. If you’ve ever suffered a starchy black bean sauce at the hands of a less experienced chef, the difference will be immediately apparent.

There are so many dishes to try here, it’s hard to narrow them down to a few standouts. Quail, not on the menu but available if ordered in advance, is wonderful, roasted in a dark brown sauce and served whole. Tangerine beef is delicate and crisply fried, served with the peel and fiery red chili.

The house mu-shu, a pancake stuffed at the table with an array of julienned carrot, cucumber, bean sprouts, shredded egg yolk and intelligently sauced pork, elevates the dish far above its mundane counterparts in most local restaurants. And even something as simple as pan-fried noodles can soar here. They’re oil-free, crisped on the bottom and softly al dente in the middle.

The restaurant attempts to take wine seriously, making a big show of the ice buckets and the service. A serious-looking fellow in a tuxedo comes by to open the bottle and insists upon your tasting it, just as if you were in an upscale Western restaurant or something.

Some nerve, because Tsing-Tao beer goes so much better with this food. Next thing you know, they’ll be charging $30 an entree as they do at the tonier restaurants on the Westside, instead of the $10 or less most of them cost now. Then who’d come?

Recommended dishes: vegetable goose, $7.50; assorted cold cuts, $22 and $28; oyster baked in French sauce, $1.50 apiece (minimum six); house mu-shu, $9.50; fish fillet in special wine sauce with garlic, $11.95; sweet and pungent shrimp, $11.95.

Harvest Inn, 550 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, (818) 956-8268. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily; dinner 4 to 10 p.m. daily. Full bar. Validated parking in garage on Maryland Avenue. Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $35 to $50.