Go Fish

Here we are again, back in the mammoth new San Gabriel Mall, where the air smells garlicky as heaven and great Chinese restaurants rub up against one another like friendly whales in the sea. And here we are in a corner of the second level, in the grand restaurant incongruously named Seafood Strip, which sounds more like a fish ‘n’ chips joint next to a Laundromat than the best Taiwanese seafood place in town. Seafood Strip is pretty swank for a Chinese restaurant, all glass and pastels, with sleek, lacquered chairs, neo-Deco detailing and a giant tank that contains a friendly snub-nose fish. The customers don’t exactly look dressed-up but rather as if they were born into tailored dresses and $400 Italian nipped-waist suits.

The concept of the Hong Kong-style seafood palace is well known in Los Angeles: ABC, NBC, VBC, Seafood City, Ocean Star, all serving steamed perch, pepper-salt shrimp and scallops with black-bean sauce. But despite the massive influx of Taiwanese into the San Gabriel Valley, nice places serving Taiwanese seafood--sort of an amalgam of Northern Chinese, general Asian and native Formosan dishes--are more difficult to find.

Just as you find Italian dishes in most Ethiopian restaurants, at Seafood Strip one might detect a relic or two from the days of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It is, in fact, possible to eat something very much like a Japanese meal here. You might start with a large sashimi platter, raw tuna and yellowtail and octopus and salmon prettily arranged around a nest of grated radish, garnished with an egg-size lump of wasabi. It’s good sashimi, impeccably fresh, though not quite up to the standard set by sushi-only restaurants such as Shibucho or Sushi Ko. Whitefish fillets float in a fine, Japanese-style miso soup, whose richness in this context suggests less the free stuff ladled out at sushi bars than the fragrant yellow-bean soups of Shanghai. Grilled fish with soybean paste has a slipperiness, a subtle sweetness, that is not unlike that of the broiled, lees-marinated cod that is a standard dish in izaka-ya -style Japanese pubs.

But still, Seafood Strip is no Japanese restaurant. As free appetizers, you are brought the little dishes--tart, crunchy radish pickles, peanuts boiled with star anise, or soft, fragrant strands of stewed seaweed--that are the staples of Chinese delicatessens. There are plenty of deep-fried dishes, but they have nothing to do with tempura: crunchy, thick battered cubes of tofu that you daub with a sticky, garlicky soy; chewy, fried cuttlefish balls that spurt hot juice; tofu-skin oyster-leek rolls strong with the muskiness of cooked oysters; fried cuttlefish, with a pepper-salt dip, that taste like the world’s best calamari. There is a crunchy, sweet salad made from shredded jellyfish, more delicious than it sounds, and a vividly flavored appetizer of cold, sliced boiled goose.

Most people here order a major dish--soft-shell turtle with chestnut, or a blandish mixed-seafood casserole, or the enormous clay-pot stew “monk jumps over the wall”--and then a bunch of sauteed vegetables or stir-fries, less distinctive, to round out the meal. Squid sauteed with Chinese celery, spinach fried with garlic and fried eggplant with basil are good, if hardly unusual. Steamed whole live shrimp are sweet and fresh. The Taiwanese standard of tiny whitebait fried with peanuts and chile--closer to crunchy fried noodles than to anything you might think of as fish--is as hard to stop eating as a basket of fries.

One unusual specialty involves crisp, melting slices of broiled eel, glazed with sweet soy and mounded on a terrific heap of brown sticky rice, “rice cake,” that has been cooked with spices and diced mushrooms and little chunks of taro, an absolutely spectacular plate of food. (The sticky rice is also served with a plump steamed crab, but the eel’s sweetness seems about right for this dish.) Another is a sweet, intensely gingery version of the Taiwanese classic three-cup chicken, called “chicken casserole,” crusted with caramelized juices, soy and rice wine, seasoned with plenty of fresh basil, served hacked into small, meaty chunks. There are a host of chafing-pot soups: An especially fine one involves jerky-like strips of dried squid and chocolate-brown slices of fresh conch, infusing the broth with something of the peaty smokiness of an old single-malt Scotch.

Seafood Strip

140 W. Valley Blvd., No. 212, San Gabriel, (818) 288-9899. Open daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 11 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. MasterCard, Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$45.