San Diego Spotlight : Dining in the Fast Lane, or Dim Sum and Get Gone

A dim sum lunch at San Choy has a lot in common with one of the “Lethal Weapon” action films: There’s a great deal of noise, and the experience certainly is interesting, but everything happens so fast that, when it’s over, the details are difficult to remember.

Dinner at this cavernous Chinese eatery on Convoy Street proceeds in a calmer environment but at the same breathless pace, and you long for a brief respite from the action so you can catch your breath and enjoy the moment. Leisurely dining, this isn’t.

Despite the inescapable sensation of lunching at the center of a malign maelstrom, feasting on the restaurant’s amazing selection of dim sum offers a much higher amusement factor than sampling the menu’s many pages in the evening. The term dim sum means “dot in the heart,” as good a way as any of categorizing this enormous variety of stuffed doughs.

A universe unto itself, dim sum encompasses steamed, fried and baked dumplings, buns and pastries. Fillings range from the recognizable--sliced barbecued pork baked in ravishing buns made sticky and delicious with brushings of sugar syrup--to unidentifiable mixtures that sometimes delight, sometimes repel. Some items take fanciful shapes, such as the “shrimp balls,” which are anything but: To get to the golf ball-sized hearts of shrimp paste, you have to fight through porcupine-like hedges of deep-fried won ton pastry strips. This is basically a meat-eater’s meal, but not everything is enclosed in dough; auxiliary offerings include platters of jelly fish, meaty barbecued ribs, chicken feet, tripe, roast duck and roast pork. It takes courage to tackle some of this stuff--the chicken feet, pale yellow and awful-looking, give some of us feet of clay--but the foods range from the decent to the delicious, and this style of lunching can be as fun as it is frenetic.

The drive down busy, fast-moving Convoy Street helps elevate the pulse to a rate that approximates the tempo inside San Choy, which is paced pretty much like a “Roadrunner” cartoon. Once inside the door, there’s more to see than the eye readily can take in, including tanks filled with strutting lobsters and pensive eels, and a barbecued meat counter in which burnished ducks hang by their crisp necks next to sides of roast pork. But, before you can take a gander, the hostess already will be leading you--impatiently at times--through ranks of crowded tables.

Within moments, a fellow will have slapped a pot of tea on the table and dashed off. Getting water or, heaven forbid, a soda, requires patience. Carts laden with the sum of the lunch menu roll constantly through the scene without the benefit of traffic lights. Their cargoes seem arranged without rhyme or reason and may include both hot and cold dishes as well as sweets. Actual cooking takes place on other carts, and still others roll past laden with trays of slender Chinese crullers and immense electric vats filled with rice soup. Glass trolleys, lighted from within, display jellyfish and barbecued meats. It becomes bewildering quickly.

Generally, the servers rattle off the names of dishes, some quite unidentifiable. Questions may or may not result in satisfactory explanations, but in the case of the pastries, when in doubt, say yes, because most are good. The jellyfish, bland and under-sauced, isn’t nearly as good as elsewhere, and the tripe--well, if you like this stuff, you already know what it tastes like. This is authentic fare, so there is no point in quibbling with the bits of bone in the bowls of chicken stew served over rice, but, from the taste point of view, this is a dish to avoid. The roast duck also contains bones but is an entirely different case, the meat beautifully succulent and unhampered by flavors other than its own.

Among the dim sum , mostly served three per order, top awards go to the steamed chicken bao , teardrop-shaped packages of yeast dough stuffed with wonderfully savory minced chicken. The barbecued pork buns--the buns themselves resemble the shiny brown hamburger buns American bakeries used to make--rank a close second, followed perhaps by the curry pastries, which encase mildly curried chicken and peas in rich crusts. Tofu skin rolls, steamed and lurking in a muddy but richly flavored sauce, offer a tasty filling of minced pork and other items.

Barbecued ribs, crusted with a sweet sauce, are meaty and delicious, and the pot stickers are more delicate than most and notable for including chopped cabbage as well as minced pork. Egg rolls, not always included on dim sum carts, arrive smoking from the deep fat and also seem more delicate than elsewhere.

The greasy filling in the fried fun gor leaves something to be desired, but the bizarre, gooey, chewy texture of this unique dough should be experienced anyway; it’s quite good, but not everyone will like it. The rice rolls similarly offer a unique texture, slippery in this case. The rice pasta dough, folded around beef, shrimp or barbecued pork, becomes tender when steamed and makes another good choice. Desserts include bland, barely sweetened egg custard tarts, baked pineapple pastries and a spongy, steamed rice “cake” that approximates the appearance and texture of tripe.

There’s more, but these listings give a fair impression of San Choy’s dim sum offerings. The pastries may look small but they fill the stomach rapidly, and a party should be able to lunch copiously for no more than $8 per person.

The restaurant is much quieter at dinner, despite a menu that runs to many pages and seems to take an authentic approach to Cantonese fare. The live fish, Dungeness crabs and other creatures that swim in the tanks are susceptible to various styles of preparation and probably are the stars of the menu.

A single meal was notable for the disconcerting speed with it arrived--everything on the table at once, which was signally unpleasant--and for the greasy, amateurish shrimp toast, which were inexplicable in a place that turns out such good dim sum . The entrees seemed competently handled and included chicken go bown , basically kung pao chicken by another name, and a rather good plate of sliced scallops with ginger, vegetables and a mild white sauce. A vegetable mix of black mushrooms and baby bok choy pleased with the flavor of the cabbage, but disappointed with the greasy sauce and flavorless mushrooms.

SAN CHOY 4444 Convoy St., San Diego 560-8188 Lunch and dinner daily Dim sum lunches about $8 per person; dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, about $25 to $50. Credit cards accepted