RESTAURANT REVIEW : Anonymous Chinese Food in a Famous-Name Setting

Up near the top of Beverly Glen, poised midway between the San Fernando Valley and Beverly Hills, is Glen Centre, a small redwood shopping center where local residents run for a pack of smokes, a roll of stamps or a bite to eat.

There’s a stationery store, a butcher, a florist, a real estate office where you might be able to find a real steal of a single-family residence for a couple million. Merchants will tell you that they cater to the likes of Gregory Peck, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Anjelica Huston, but in my visits there, I’ve only spotted a few television stars, a famous nightclub owner and a woman walking her pet lynx. Also serving this community are a number of restaurants, ranging from fancy dinner houses to sidewalk cafes.

The latest is Le Chine Wok, which is by all definitions a small, unpretentious neighborhood Chinese place. Inside, there’s a small, spare dining room with pale pink walls, a mural of fish and a glassed-in kitchen.

In the kitchen, one sees the cooks working at the woks over hot flames. Behind the burners is a stainless-steel wall over which many small streams of water run continuously. The hostess explains that the water absorbs the oil that rises up into the air from the extraordinarily hot temperatures used in the wok cooking. The woks themselves are serious-looking pieces of equipment: Each one weighs more than 20 pounds, although you would never know it by the offhand, lively way the cooks toss food around in them.

The clientele is what you might expect at such a casual neighborhood place: couples of all ages, groups of friends, a lot of people who are fresh off the tennis courts. The waiters greet all their customers as friends. In general, the service is fast and eager-to-please.

The food, however, is unexceptional. Despite the fact that it’s enthralling to watch the cooks at work, the end product is nothing to rave over. Pot stickers are crescents of gummy noodle and bland filling. Onion pancakes are doughy and taste mostly like, well, pancakes, such as I might make from a mix at home; the accompanying sweet red sauce and hot mustard did nothing to improve them. Spring rolls were two standard little fried tubes of crunchy vegetables.

Lemon scallops, on special, turned out to be so many little discs of deep-fried scallops set in a clear, sticky-sweet lemon sauce.

But I liked the orange-beef, which our waiter told us was the restaurant’s most popular beef dish. While still teetering toward the meat-as-candy category, the deep-fried, gingery, sticky beef confection wasn’t as cloyingly sweet as other orange-beef dishes I’ve had elsewhere. I also liked its chewiness.

Every time I’ve been to Le Chine Wok, I’ve found at least one dish I liked. One night it was the kung pao shrimp, a mountain of fresh, sweet shrimp with peanuts and wonderful, hot dried chiles. Another time, we couldn’t stop spearing Sichuan-style string beans into our mouths. Perhaps the best dish was the garlic eggplant with crumbles of meat. In the cooking, the eggplant skin gained an addictive chewiness and the meat a pleasurable softness. The whole thing had a big-flavored, deep spiciness.

It’s not the sort of Chinese food you’d drive out of your way to eat, but if you’re in the area, Le Chine Wok is a pleasant diversion.

Le Chine Wok, 2958 Beverly Glen Circle, Los Angeles, (310) 475-1146. Open seven days for lunch and dinner. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Parking in lot. Dinner for two, food only, $20-$50.