RESTAURANT REVIEW : Bamboo Opts for the Unusual

You rarely have it both ways in a Chinese restaurant. Good-looking places tend to serve hopelessly banal food. Places with great food generally have all the charm of a holding cell.

Bamboo is one of the exceptions. It’s a small, hip-looking Sherman Oaks cafe that evidently thinks of itself as a sort of art gallery, but it is also a place that grabs your attention with a reasonably authentic style of Chinese cooking.

Reasonably authentic is about as far as I’ll go, however. Bamboo is not afraid to serve dishes that rarely make it to the suburbs, such as cold jellyfish, braised sea cucumber with green onion and spicy salt spareribs, but the flavors just aren’t as intense as they might be. I suspect that if the kitchen used a touch less sugar in some of these preparations and gave its spicy dishes a little more of a wallop, the restaurant would move up the authenticity scale with a flourish.

Maybe it doesn’t need to. Bamboo’s pastel green walls are hung with Edward Munch-style Expressionist oils--anathema to the dreamy, impressionist Chinese aesthetic--and the waiters, a somewhat diffident group of young men and women with modern hairstyles and trendy eyeglasses, could easily pass for art students. All this makes for a distinctive restaurant. In fact, if it weren’t for the hokey classical pottery and fancy white linen tablecloths (both of which look strangely out of context here), one might be tempted to think of Bamboo as a Chinese version of Cafe des Artistes.

Almost all of China is represented on the outsize menu, from the cold dishes of Shanghai and seafood specialties of Canton to the fiery, mouth-numbing specialties of the north. The cold appetizers come heaped on platters, and one plateful will easily satisfy three or four. Aromatic beef is thinly sliced and perfumed with star anise. It has a slightly gelatinous texture and is wonderful with a cold Tsing Tao . Light, crunchy jellyfish looks like a free-form pasta, but the flavors of sesame oil and ginger dispel that image quickly.

Only the drunken chicken disappoints. It’s neatly sliced cold chicken, trimmed of all fat and cooked to a grainy whiteness. The problem is this chicken lacks soul . . . not to mention rice wine, the lingering aroma of which is notably absent.

The majority of Bamboo’s hot appetizers are strictly shopping-mall fare, such as fried shrimp and barbecued spareribs, but there are two that evoke images of Monterey Park. Spareribs, Shanghai-style, are simply deep-fried pieces of breaded pork cutlet that you dip in a mixture of spices and salt. Special chicken roll looks like an egg roll, but the comparison ends there. The skin is a non-greasy, multilayered egg and flour crepe, and the filling is delectable minced chicken with fresh bamboo, grated carrot and sliced black mushroom.

The menu’s specialties page is full of interesting choices, but you pay for the privilege of ordering them. Kon pao lobster is a terrific dish but carries a Westside price tag ($24.50) and turns out to be different from the menu description. The menu alleges that the dish is chunks of lobster meat with green onion and pine nuts in a spicy sauce. The reality is saucy, sweet, hot lobster astride a pile of sweet crispy walnuts--an irresistible, if misleading, combination.

This page is also home to roast sea cucumbers and lemon scallops, as well as abalone with straw mushrooms and crispy catfish, all of which carry hefty price tags. You can really do almost as well with items from the regular menu, most of which are half the price of these specials.

Hunan-style lamb, for example, is a platter of lean lamb, sliced razor-thin, mingling with winter vegetables such as cabbage, green onion and carrot in a hot bean sauce enlivened with fagara --the native “pepper” of China (it has a fairly sharp flavor; in Chinese, red pepper is called “foreign fagara “). There is credible, though rather dry, smoked duck, made with tea and camphor leaves. A few vegetable dishes are first-rate: Sauteed spinach with fresh garlic is simplicity itself, and hot, spicy eggplant is one of the few dishes here that sings with hotness. Dry sauteed string beans manage to be moist and crunchy at the same time, without a drop of extra oil in the recipe.

Suggested dishes: spareribs, Shanghai-style; $8.50, aromatic beef, $6.75; lamb Hunan-style, $8.75; sauteed spinach, $5.95; kon pao lobster, $24.50.

Bamboo, 14010 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 788-0202. Lunch and dinner 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily. Full bar. Valet parking in rear lot. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, $25 to $50.