RESTAURANT REVIEW : Some Novel Twists Make for Tasty Meals

The ‘90s are bringing us a flock of New Age Chinese restaurants, where Western sensibilities marry gracefully with authentic Oriental flavors.

Glendale’s new La Xiang (pronounced “Lah Shong”) is just such a restaurant. It’s a beautifully designed room where you get to hear lots of soft mood music by composers in the Ravel and Debussy category while relaxing on chic Finnish-modern chairs of raw blond wood. But as Western as it sounds, what comes out of the restaurant’s kitchen has no such divided loyalties.

Add the name Peter Nagashima to the equation. He’s the Japanese-born chef-owner who honed his cooking skills in Hong Kong, even learning to speak Cantonese in the process. Nagashima’s refined sense of the Chinese kitchen is ultimately what impresses you and what rounds out the experience at La Xiang (the poetic name means “midnight jasmine”), but the design is what first grabs your attention. The airy, understated dining room is filled with ambient light, which streams in through the large, street-side windows without making things seem bright or garish.

Everything about this room, from the roughly hewn stone floor to the ceiling of narrow beams, seems to flow together with grace and harmony. The salmon-colored table cloths are offset by golden Doric columns scattered throughout the room. The sense of space is almost European, very relaxing for a Chinese restaurant.

But the real draw is Nagashima’s food, clean-tasting, artfully plated interpretations of traditional Chinese dishes with occasional Japanese twists. Take crab puffs, in many restaurants a sort of glorified won ton with a cream cheese-based filling. Here it is a spinoff of the Japanese gratin, a large orange puff over little ramekin pots filled with a baked mayonnaise suspension of shiitake mushrooms, crab meat and leek. And how about Nagashima’s yin and yang toast, wonderful minced chicken and shrimp toasts unmistakably British in their appearance. (They look like finger sandwiches but taste completely Oriental.)

Nagashima’s appetizers, many of which are the same as those found on dim sum carts throughout the city, are particularly good here. They tend to be small and delicate, just like dim sum in Hong Kong, and generally better-crafted than their larger local counterparts. What the menu calls Shanghai dim sum are in reality shao loong bao , “little dragon buns,” those round, juice-filled dumplings that can be so irresistible. The classic ha kau and shiu mai are brilliant: soft, steaming noodle dough with bits of bamboo in the filling, as there would be in the chef’s native Tokyo.

One of the house specialties is the classic beggar’s chicken, a vegetable-stuffed whole chicken. Originally, it was baked in a clay shell--according to legend, the recipe evolved when some poor villagers stole a chicken and needed to conceal what they were cooking.

Nagashima’s version is arguably a bit bizarre, but nonetheless completely delicious. Instead of clay, he uses aluminum foil to seal in the natural juices of the chicken, but then wraps the outer foil in a Bocuse-style pastry crust. It’s a major surprise to open a steaming pastry and see a ball of metal foil inside, but, well, the dish works.

In fact, so does most everything here. Shrimp taco is a delightful spinoff of the minced pigeon dish eaten around the Chinese New Year, sauteed minced shrimp, water chestnut, pine nuts and mixed vegetables eaten in a lettuce leaf. Eggplant with garlic sauce is properly piquant, with soft fried strips of purplish eggplant molded together into an appetizing mound.

There are good scallops, lightly sauteed to a soft gold color and served over a bed of fresh broccoli. Even “tangy sirloin”--called orange beef on less accomplished menus--is done with flair. The delicately fried meat is shot through with the aromas of ginger, garlic and orange peel, and much less heavily battered than in the more Americanized Mandarin-style restaurants where the dish enjoys its main popularity.

Enjoy these dishes with a side dish Nagashima calls fried rice wrapped in lotus leaves, little clumps of rice mingling with peas, leeks and soft-cooked egg that he steams inside those aromatic green leaves. Call it a New Age way to eat rice with your Chinese dinner. No one is going to spoil the fun by telling you that the dish is thousands of years old.

Suggested dishes: Yin and yang toast, $3.75; Shanghai dim sum, $4.25; shrimp taco, $11.75; beggar’s chicken, $18; fried rice wrapped in lotus leaves, $3.75.

La Xiang, 117 E. Broadway, Glendale, (818) 243-8686. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, dinner 3 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 3 to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Full bar. Two hours of free parking in adjacent structure. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25 to $50.