Chow Fun

At 12:30 on a Saturday night, the Chinese coffee shop St. Honore is pumping , lines out the door, teddy-bear-shaped glasses of sweet red-bean ice on practically all the tables, gridlock in the giant parking lot out back: the most popular place in Monterey Park.

There are an awful lot of small children running around at this hour, parents blearily oblivious. Some date nights are winding down; other couples, wired on St. Honore’s strong iced coffee, look as if they’re just getting started. Groups of teen-age boys slouch in pastel booths, cigarettes dangling artfully from their lower lips, nursing iced tea as if it were bourbon, pushing around mounds of noodles. And here comes your order, a heaping, steaming plate of . . . ham ‘n’ eggs. St. Honore might be a Chinese restaurant, but that doesn’t mean it specializes in Chinese food.

Forget Chiu Chow noodle parlors or new-wave Shanghainese dives. The hottest trend in new Chinese restaurants seems to be the Hong Kong-style coffee shop, and it seems that no major San Gabriel Valley development is complete unless it includes at least one example of the breed: Litz, Savoy, Helena, the Other Taste, American Steak House, the Great Food Cafe, most decorated in the bland, vaguely Deco “Brazil” look that seems to dominate upscale Chinese places.

What these coffee shops serve is basically American food cooked for the Chinese palate as it would be in a Western-style restaurant in Hong Kong, plus a few Chinese snacks. To the uninitiated, the menus at these places can be baffling, often running the gamut from nachos to chow fun , BLTs to congee . One beverage is an iced, sweetened blend of tea and coffee that tastes peculiarly herbal, like an odd medicinal tincture. Steak, blanketed in a gooeyblack-pepper sauce on sizzling metal trays, is usually the most popular dish. They all serve baked ox tongue, and chow mein, and spaghetti Bolognese, and baroque, sticky drinks made with various beans and seeds.

The food tends to bear about the same relation to actual American stuff that pink-parasol American-Cantonese restaurant food does to the authentic quick cuisine of say, Luk Yue. Even so, St. Honore, probably the best of the coffee shops and more or less the Chinese Ships in a sea of Chinese Sizzlers, is a pretty fun scene, at least if you’re fond of big meat in brown gravy: pork chops with mushrooms, Portuguese chicken (Macao-style), ox tongue with onions, grilled chicken with bacon, a rather gamy-tasting filet mignon in black-pepper sauce--all served with French fries, tired vegetables and a big plate of white rice or indelibly garlicked spaghetti. For another few bucks, you can get your steak or chicken as part of an “escargot dinner,” which includes salad, a cup of gluey soup and some snails. The onion rings aren’t bad.

Still, the best stuff here tends to be that which is most Chinese: chow fun noodles with bitter Chinese greens; complex, curry-tinged Singapore-style vermicelli fried with bits of meat and seafood; Hainan chicken with garlicky chicken rice and a pungent ginger dip. The restaurant understands the essential, soothing blandness of congee --Chinese rice porridge, flavored with shreds of ginger and pork and slippery bits of preserved egg--as the perfect antidote to a night of serious drinking.

The fountain drinks in glass teddy bears, especially the subtle, delicious red-bean ice, are first rate, a night of serious drinking in themselves.

St. Honore

141 N. Atlantic Blvd. (in Mar Center), Monterey Park, (818) 281-3281. Open 24 hours, seven days. Lot parking. No alcohol. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $8-$25.