RESTAURANT REVIEW HUNAN : Chow Mein Down : A Thousand Oaks restaurant offers the garlicky, gingery and not-too-spicy fare of China’s Hunan region.

Although I had made several trips to the shopping center where Hunan is located, I had never given this Chinese restaurant a second glance. From the outside, Hunan is drab--with closed Venetian blinds in the windows and yellow cardboard signs announcing lunch specials. There’s absolutely no indication that this may be a Chinese restaurant of note.

Then I went there for lunch and discovered that the restaurant offers Chinese regional cooking--Hunan-style--rarely found in these parts. It also serves up Chinese cuisine from other provinces in a comfortable setting that is modest but classy with a hint of Art Deco.

Hunan is named after a province in the middle of China and west of Sichuan province, with which it shares a fondness for hot peppers and a liberal use of ginger and garlic. Hunan cooking also has some of the characteristics of food from Shanghai, to the east, with its rich, dark and slightly sweet sauces.

The restaurant’s menu says “the art of Hunan’s cooking is that it is spicy, yet not oily or starchy.” I found this to be appetizingly true. The dishes I sampled had wonderful and subtle variations on themes of sweet and sour, salty and bitter, ginger and garlic, and hot and savory.

But if you like your food startlingly hot, be sure to ask for it because the spicy dishes, though printed in red on the menu, are fairly tame.

I returned to the restaurant one night recently with a group of family and friends, and we sat at one of the big round tables in back. It may not have been a genuine Chinese banquet, but the dishes that swirled before us on the Lazy Susan made for a memorable meal.

Hunan actually offers tastes from all over China. You can have tender Mongolian lamb superbly served in a rich, gingery sauce with plenty of scallions. Or try the won ton soup, a universal Chinese dish, with a rich, hearty broth, slippery won tons and fresh spinach leaves.

Distinctly Hunan dishes--specially identified on the menu as “first time served in Thousand Oaks”--included an appetizer called “shredded chicken in assorted flavors.” It was served cold and had a marvelous combination of tastes, including peanut sauce, soy, vinegar and red pepper sauce. Another “first time” dish consisted of boneless duck with young ginger root. The duck was sweetly flavored, a combination of both tender and crispy textures, and the ginger resembled crunchy celery without the strings.

We tried a whole steamed rock cod, which came covered with a blanket of fresh cilantro in a subtle, brothlike sauce. Most people at the table felt it was too plain, but I liked its delicacy. Another modest dish was o’mei, an assortment of vegetables in a white cornstarch sauce that was less interesting as it cooled.

I ordered the chow mein with misgivings, just to make one of the kids happy, and it turned out to be one of the best dishes of all, with fat, cabbage-flavored noodles, vegetable bits and thin strips of chicken. Other highly recommended dishes include their fabulous sauteed spinach with chopped garlic--actually big sweet slices of garlic.

Sichuan eggplant was also wonderful, with ground pork, ginger, garlic, green onions and a surprisingly appealing texture. Orange beef, an intensely hot and spicy Hunan specialty, came with thin slices of crisp fried beef, with tiny tastes of orange peel. This was the dish I woke up wanting more of in the middle of the night.

The service was first-rate, and they kept the teapot filled with hot jasmine tea. They also served a complimentary plate of fruit for dessert--a nice touch. Possibly the only non-Chinese food served at Hunan was the fortune cookies (first introduced at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park). But I have never had a Chinese meal without them. The most mysterious fortune was our son’s (“Your home is a ple from which you draw ha”), until we realized he had accidentally eaten half of it. But with this kind of food, you could hardly blame him for overeating.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Hunan, 1352 N. Moorpark Road, Thousand Oaks, 371-0075. Lunch and dinner served everyday 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Wine and beer, major credit cards, dinner for two, food only $15-$50.