At Chef Chen’s, Chinese Food by a Master

Suppose a master Chinese chef was asked to tailor his artistry to commercial tastes. It would be more or less like having Picasso do charcoal portraits down on Fisherman’s Wharf, or hiring Liszt to play McCartney at a piano bar.

That’s sort of what is happening down at Chef Chen’s, a new, surprisingly hip-looking Chinese restaurant parked next to a Lucky in Laguna Niguel. When I say hip-looking, I really mean trendy: an uncharacteristically spare design with an overwhelming sense of vastness.

Perhaps it’s the color of the walls, a pale, almost austere green with the faint iridescence you see in a soft sponge. Perhaps it’s the science fiction-style light fixtures--tiny bulbs dangling from the high ceiling at the end of jet black metal rods. In any case, everything about this restaurant’s design explores new territory for Laguna Niguel.

Some of the food is new to these parts as well. The chef is Shiang Shun Chen, a self-confident man nearly 70 years of age, with more than 50 years’ experience in Chinese kitchens.

I didn’t know it before I first came here, but I’d enjoyed this man’s food with regularity in the mid-’70s. He was the longtime chef at Chef Chu’s restaurant in Los Altos on the San Francisco Peninsula. When I lived in Palo Alto, my girlfriend and I used to meet there every Friday after work.

Chef Chen has always been, as I recall, a little ahead of his time. He introduced many dishes to the peninsula, and now he is doing the same in South County. I just wish he wouldn’t play it safe.

He avoids MSG, a novel practice he started way back when in Los Altos. But in its place, he sometimes gets a bit heavy-handed with the sugar. This is a failing common to Chinese restaurants breaking new ground--based on the belief that non-Chinese like sugar in everything they eat.

Chef Chen shouldn’t try to second-guess his diners. When he plays it straight, he is a true master.

Fried shrimp ball proves the point. This appetizer is simple enough, merely golden golf-ball-size portions of minced shrimp and leek, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried, but Chen’s execution is perfect. The balls are juicy, moist and almost entirely greaseless.

However, I didn’t taste many of the appetizers here, because they’re mostly of the egg roll and barbecue pork school. I did pause for the chef’s fried dumplings and had a mixed response. These aren’t the juiciest dumplings in the world, although they do have plenty of flavor. The outsides are crisp, and the filling is properly dense.

Soups are one medium in which the chef refuses to compromise, and consequently they are a highlight. Seafood and tofu soup is one a lesser chef could never hope to reproduce. It’s only tiny cubes of tofu in a shrimp broth with egg white and black mushroom, but the egg and mushroom have a truly velvety texture and the shrimp are as soft and sweet as a baby’s kiss.

An off-menu soup that the chef plans to put on the menu very soon, yu pin gai tong , is nothing you’d want to call delicate. This is a powerfully intense chicken broth with flaky slices of fresh rock cod, full of sesame and baby lettuce. One small bowlful and you’ll remember it all week.

He also uses lettuce creatively in gai soong, the minced appetizer served in a lettuce leaf. This may be the restaurant’s best dish: tiny bits of Chinese ham and steamed chicken mixed together with bamboo, black mushroom and string bean beans amazingly removed from their pods. The lettuce leaves sit atop delicate rice pancakes, and you pick them up in the pancakes and eat them burrito-style. They don’t even need sauce.

So far, so good. But in main dishes the sweetness begins to cloy.

One dish where you expect it is candied pecans with prawns, where prawns are lightly sauteed in a mustard-mayonnaise sauce and topped with the nuts. Chen made this dish famous in Taiwan, and honestly, the nuts are fantastic, which is more than I can say for the prawns (I don’t like sweet shrimp, but my friends were wild for them). These are probably the best candied nuts I’ve ever had, perfectly crisp and sweet from a coating so ethereal you aren’t even sure it exists.

You don’t expect sweetness, however, in a dish like shredded pork in garlic sauce, where julienned pork is cooked with Chinese vegetables in a thick brown emulsion. Or in Hunan beef--from the chef’s own province, yet--but that’s what you get: stir-fried beef with fresh broccoli in sweet pepper sauce.

You can console yourself, though, with some of the specials. Lover’s prawns are a plateful of prawns in two different sauces, one a light rice wine sauce, the other a chili and tomato sauce. Dry braised whole fish, usually rock cod, comes deep-fried with a good, crunchy coating. Twice-cooked pork, a Hunan favorite, is pork boiled and stir-fried with napa cabbage, black mushroom and red pepper.

If you like Chinese desserts, Chef Chen has a specialty I’d say has practically no equal. The one catch is you have to call in advance for it. I’m talking about something called thousand-layer bun, a flaky multilayered rice flour pastry with an orange ginger paste inside.

Eating this dessert, I envisioned Picasso’s guitar, a Liszt crescendo. Pretty fair company for a Laguna Niguel shopping mall, I’d say.

Chef Chen’s is moderately priced. Appetizers are $3.95 to $7.95. Soups are $4.55 to $8.25. Main dishes are $6.25 to $19.

CHEF CHEN’S

30251 Golden Lantern, No. 5A, Laguna Niguel.

(714) 249-3980.

Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday; dinner 3-9:30 p.m Sunday through Thursday, 3-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

American Express, MasterCard and Visa.