RESTAURANT REVIEW : Corporate Flavor at Plum Tree

Corporate America meets modern China in Woodland Hills. You can eat well there, but I’m not positive that the meeting is a wholly fruitful one.

Certainly the Plum Tree Inn, a sister of the somewhat less-Westernized Plum Tree in Chinatown, is impressively designed. To begin with, it’s at the top of one of the hilliest portions of Ventura Boulevard, so approaching it gives the impression of seeing the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace from a far-off plateau.

Inside, though, the image gets lost in splashes of Technicolor. You walk through a set of Op Art double doors, sort of an amorphous collage of metals and pastels. Then you walk beneath a series of Art Nouveau banners that look as if they were spirited away from the Coliseum during an Olympic festival.

Once seated at the elegant, white-clad tables, you’re in for further visual confusion. Looking up, you get the distinct impression that the top half of the restaurant does not belong with the bottom. There are lots of metal beams that suggest adult Tinkertoys offsetting a chalet-type ceiling, kids’ deconstructionism carried out with a vengeance. Down below, it is far more conventional: pastels, vinyls and other hallmarks of contemporary Chinese restaurant design.

I wasn’t being cheeky when I made reference to corporate America. The Plum Tree clearly gives the impression of a restaurant where every detail was planned in a boardroom. It’s the type of place--airy and spacious, but affording some degree of intimacy--that is ideal for a business lunch. So it is no coincidence that at least one table full of blue suits was within whispering distance of my table all three times I dined there.

It’s also a restaurant where little coming out of the kitchen has been left to chance. Most of the dishes are proven winners, served in enormous portions, displaying the type of success that corporate America worships. And, predictably, soul is in short supply.

But if you use a little savvy, all should be well here. There are a host of good dishes on the menu, done almost as they would be in Chinatown. Know what to avoid, and you will not be bankrupted by the experience.

The best hot appetizer is probably chicken roll, a thick-skinned egg roll with a spicy chicken and minced bamboo filling. They don’t pull any punches with the spices on this one. I had to refill my water glass three times while I ate it. There are good, chewy, steamed dumplings and passable fried ones, too (though the latter are a bit too oily for my taste).

But the real sleeper on the appetizer list would have to be the spareribs, Shanghai-style. Chinese restaurant fanatics know this dish by a different name: spicy salt spareribs. It’s really a pork chop that has been cut up and deep fried, and Plum Tree Inn gives you a heaping plateful. You won’t get any spicy salt on the side, but the dish will easily serve four.

The Shanghai-style cold dishes are a little less appealing. Aromatic beef, sliced like brisket and flavored with star anise, is tasty, but you’d better have a good set of choppers to deal with it. Wine chicken is too pungent and fatty; better try this dish in the Chinatown restaurant. And what of the vegetarian ham, a personal favorite of mine made from soy bean? Well, I can’t say. It’s on the menu but they never seem to have any on hand.

The soups I tasted could not be faulted. Assorted winter melon is delightful, a clear broth with chicken, soft shrimp, smoky Chinese ham and cubes of the clean-tasting, squash-like melon. There is a good hot and sour soup, filled with mushroom and bamboo, and a more authentic bean curd spinach soup, very light on the palate. You really can’t miss in the soup section.

All will be quite well here, actually, if you don’t feel compelled to order too many main courses. I had to try a signature dish, so I sampled, against my better instincts, the Plum Tree Beef.

What a mistake. It turns out to be giant globs of fried cornstarch, drizzled with a wet sauce full of sugar, orange peel and scallions. The beef is totally undetectable. This dish has to be one of the ghastliest things I’ve ever tasted. If a native Chinese would eat this, I’m Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Stay away from anything with batter, actually. Better are simple sautees on the order of sauteed shrimp (nice rice wine sauce) or lamb Hunan style (good chile sauce). Eat these and you’ll do just fine.

But mark my words. Complicate things too much here, as with Plum Tree special--a horrid combination of lobster, chicken, pork, Chinese vegetables and goodness knows what else--and you’re out of business. You’d almost welcome a hostile takeover.

Suggested dishes: spareribs, Shanghai-style, $8.75; steamed dumplings, $6.25; assorted winter melon soup, $4.95 (for two) and $8.95 (for four); sauteed shrimp, $13.50.

Plum Tree Inn, 20461 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills, (818) 888-6001, fax (818) 888-7028. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays to Fridays, dinner 5 to 10 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays, 5 to 11 p.m. Fridays to Sundays. Full bar. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $40.