May Garden: Paradise Found in Gourmet Sampler

If you have any preconceived notions about how a Chinese restaurant is supposed to look, throw them out when you come to May Garden. About 10 years ago it was a French restaurant called La Cuisine, and outwardly it hasn’t changed much.

You still dine on Villeroy & Boch china in formal, almost stuffy, rooms furnished with velvet-backed chairs. One of the rooms is sedate and pristine, with floral drapes, subdued lighting and not even the slightest hint of the Orient. A second dining room looks like a dowager’s library where shelves of rich wood are stocked with Western and Oriental knickknacks and the darkly paneled walls are hung with understated Chinese watercolors. The only thing missing is a rope for summoning the butler.

Eating Chinese food in these surroundings may take a bit of getting used to. You are certainly going to have to ask for chopsticks if you want them, but the cooking at May Garden is solid and substantial, and only slightly compromised in terms of authenticity.

There are several good cold dishes, for example, which you don’t find at more Westernized Chinese restaurants. You also find a spate of rustic soups and a variety of interesting house specials. But none of this is what really draws the crowds. The real deal here is something the restaurant calls its “gourmet sampler,” a mind-blowing concept I simply haven’t seen anywhere else.

Here’s how it works: For a fixed price ($12.95 per person), you may choose any three items from a special menu listing 62 different dishes. Finish what you’ve ordered and they will bring you three more, theoretically until you have tried them all (the portions may be appetizeresque, but there’s really no chance that you could try them all).

You won’t find the high-ticket items such as cold dishes, shark’s fin soup or lobster specialties on the sampler menu, but you will find practically everything else the restaurant serves. This is more than a super-economical way to get acquainted with the restaurant--it’s a way to get acquainted with Chinese cuisine itself.

The classier dishes, of course, have to be ordered a la carte. I happen to love the cold dishes, which the menu tucks away inconspicuously under the heading “hors d’oeuvres.” A medium hors d’oeuvre platter has a steep price (at $19.95, it approaches the price of the gourmet sampler for two), but it’s well worth it, laden as it is with garlicky jellyfish, soft aromatic beef redolent of anise and ginger and pieces of wine-marinated chicken. The chicken, incidentally, has been thoroughly sanitized, fully cooked and completely de-boned, something that the traditional recipe for this dish does not at all call for.

Imperial soup and shark’s fin soup are worth ordering separately, even if you plan on eating your fill via the gourmet sampler. Imperial soup is delicate and ethereal. Ground chicken, king crab meat and egg white are the main ingredients, and they look as if they are floating on air when you raise the spoon to your lips.

I was more than a little suspicious when I saw the shark’s fin soup offered at $12.50 for two--it costs more than that just to buy a fin. But when the soup arrived, it all came clear: Shark’s fin is a gelatinous substance, prized by the Chinese for the texture it adds, but it doesn’t provide much flavor. What these people have done is to make a delicious soup flavored with black mushroom and chicken, just as any good Chinese kitchen would, and serve it underthickened, using less of the fin. The result might not please a Chinese gourmand, but it makes for a wonderful soup.

Ordering the gourmet sampler limits you to a choice of egg flower or hot and sour soup, and you won’t want to fill up on those with all the other options to come. You might want to start with some appetizers. We took pot stickers, paper-wrapped chicken and sesame shrimp. The pot stickers were credible models with crisped noodle skins, and the paper-wrapped chicken, though sticky and a bit heavy on the ginger, rated a pass. The last was a loser, though, a rather unappetizing oily piece of toast wrapped in shrimp meat.

The second round, in our case comprising moo shu pork, dry braised shrimp and sesame seed chicken, is apt to be better. The moo shu, a light pancake stuffed with shredded pork, eggs, vegetables and a mildly cloying plum sauce, went down easy. The misleadingly named dry braised shrimp is really a sweet tomato-based dish loaded with chopped onion, the issue further confused because the menu stars the dish as hot and spicy (it’s rather mild, actually). I’m not a fan of sesame seed chicken, but though this one has too much sugar in the sauce, I can live with its light cornstarch batter.

We lasted through a third round, just barely. It consisted of good sauteed spinach, a dish of black mushrooms with bamboo shoots in an unctuous brown sauce and a delicious kung pao beef--a little light on the peanuts and chilies, perhaps, but prepared with a good cut of lean, tender beef. Had we finished those, we could have gone on to orange-flavored chicken, scallops Szechuan, pork fried rice or any of around 50 others.

The one catch is that you’ve got to finish what you’ve ordered, or at least come close. If you don’t, the restaurant will tack on a surcharge of $4 per dish. At this low price, I wonder if they don’t screen the door for professional wrestlers, or at least require the pros to order a few cold dishes a la carte.

May Garden is moderately priced. A la carte prices are as follows: house specials, $9.95 to $26; appetizers, $3.50 to $10.50; soups, $4 to $19.50; main dishes, $5.50 to $17.95. The gourmet sampler is $12.95 per person.

* MAY GARDEN

* 1400 S. Bristol St., Costa Mesa.

* (714) 751-9229.

* Open Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 4 to 10:30 p.m. Closed Sunday.

* All major cards accepted.