Happy Meals

Happy Valley is pretty much everything a person could want in a Chinatown restaurant, two minutes from the Music Center, convenient both for an early jury-duty lunch and 2 a.m. suppers after Fuzzyland closes, mostly cheap enough for artistically inclined proofreaders yet with expensive live seafood among the finest in town. If you want, the waiters will even read through the seasonal wall signs for you, translating as they go: “Steamed live scallop--nope, we’re out of it; tiny scallop, out; abalone, too expensive; crunchy bamboo-insides, you wouldn’t like; pan-fried frog with pepper-salt, that’s really good.”

And because Happy Valley is tucked away in a fragrant Chinatown alley, behind the old Hong Kong Cafe and just across from the jewelry store that hosted a famous shootout a few years back, your friends will think that you’ve stumbled onto a secret place. (It’s not much of a secret: At any hour it’s likely to be populated with crab-eating Mexican families, plenty of Chinese and the sort of haughty old-time character actors who wear ascots after midnight even in July.)

If you’ve ever been into a bare-bones Chinese restaurant, you know what Happy Valley looks like, right down to the live-fish tanks and the plastic water glasses. If you’ve spent any time in Cantonese seafood joints, you can probably recite the menu before the waiter sets it down upon the table. It’s all here, higher than the Mon Kee standard: clams in black bean sauce and crabs sauteed with ginger and garlic, steamed tilapia and fried rock-cod fillets.

There is an incredible scallop-and-dried-scallop soup, the marine sweetness of the one bouncing off the subtle smokiness of the other in a cornstarch-thickened base. Casseroles are wonderful, sizzling things served in blackened clay pots, though they’re listed on the menu in Chinese only for some reason. Ask for the hot-pot with roast pork and oysters, which are plump and fresh in a fine, briny gravy, or for the hot-pot with catfish and garlic. Vegetables include the usual bok choy and Chinese broccoli, as well as the harder-to-find snow-pea leaves. An incredible vegetable--apparently the imported pith from a certain kind of bamboo plant--sauteed with crab meat and egg, is slippery and sharp-tasting, with an elusive crunch that makes it the rough textural equivalent of eating shark’s fin and jellyfish at the same time. (Too bad: Bamboo pith seems to be ferociously expensive.)

Shrimp with spicy salt are deep-fried to impeccable crispness, peppery enough to leave your lips tingling and as impossible to stop eating as great crinkle-cut fries set out on a delicatessen table. Every new-style Cantonese restaurant in town has this dish on the menu. Happy Valley’s is somehow fresher-tasting, though not so tasty as the definitive version served at San Francisco’s Yuet Lee restaurant. Happy Valley prepares frog the same way, a big, delicious platterful of amphibian crunchies--watch for the bones.

There are many varieties of squab, minced and served in lettuce cups, or roasted whole to a superb, glossy meatiness.

But of course, no visit to a Chinese seafood house is complete without a visit to the live tanks, where the dearest and most delicious foods are to be found.

Exhibit A here is likely to be the Alaskan king crab, a gnarled old monster that looms over the lobsters in the tank the way Gamera did over Tokyo. All evening long, people are ceremoniously ushered over to examine the beast, to pay homage to its massive shovelhead body and its sapling-thick arms. All evening long these potential executioners calculate the price of its head and back away from the tank with shrugs and regrets. A hundred and fifty clams is a lot to pay for a plate of crab.

Somewhat less expensive is the Maine lobster, at $10 a pound, a tender animal cooked just long enough to jell its sweet flesh and served, perhaps, in a fragrant garlic sauce. Giant oysters are briefly steamed and served on the half shell with a sprinkling of black beans and chopped scallion. A flounder is served “double-pleasure” style, its flesh briefly stir-fried with carrot and ginger, and its bones quickly deep-fried to a crisp, to be dipped into pungent bean sauce and eaten like skeletal potato chips.

Happy Valley Seafood Restaurant, 407 Bamboo Lane, Chinatown, (213) 617-3662. Open Thursday through Tuesday noon to 3 a.m. (closed Wednesday). MasterCard and Visa. Beer and wine. Take-out. Validated parking in Bamboo Plaza parking lot (entrance at 420 Bernard St.). Dinner for two, food only, $12-$24 (and up--WAY up--if you order live seafood).