Small Chinese Place Is Hard to Top for Flavor

The arrival of several major Chinese restaurants in North County this year may have drawn attention away from some of the solid, reliable standbys in the area.

Two of the better new houses, the Fortune Cookie and Formosa, are in Rancho Bernardo and also are rather grand, especially contrasted with the small, neighborhood-style places found in so many North County shopping centers. Each offers a well-written menu and thoughtful cooking.

But some of the neighborhood places continue to be tops for cuisine, as a pair of recent visits to the unassuming Star House in San Marcos confirmed. When last reviewed, this modest eatery seemed about as good as any for carefully prepared Chinese cuisine, and, although it isn’t nearly as fancy as some of the newer places (it isn’t at all fancy, if truth be told), the Star House kitchen still holds its own.

This family-run place may be nothing more than two small rooms, lined with booths and decorated with garish silk flower arrangements, but the flavors of most dishes are elegant and rewarding. The menu in many cases parrots those common elsewhere--most local Chinese restaurants seem both afraid not to offer the same choices as their peers and reluctant to offer anything that lacks group recognition--but the dishes often seem different, because of the sophistication of preparation.

A case in point would be the eggplant in yu - shiang sauce, perhaps not everyone’s dish, but good enough to convert many whose opinion of eggplant is less than friendly.

Some restaurants serve this in the form of a soupy, oily stew, a most unattractive presentation. The approach at Star House is superior: It cuts the vegetable into thick, spaghetti-like strands and braises them to a tender but still chewy finish in a sauce that is both sweet and tangy. The resulting dish works well on its own and seems even more delightful as a vegetable accompaniment to dishes that consist primarily of meat.

Star House is among a handful of local restaurants that offer conch, a shellfish that requires special handling since, left to its own devices, it prefers to have about the same resilience and taste appeal as rubber. The simplest dish offers conch in a gentle saute with black bean sauce, a mildly pungent treatment that is among the best accorded seafood by Chinese cuisine.

The shellfish also appears in a luxurious stir-fry of mixed seafood that tumbles together green-lip mussels, shrimp, scallops and chunks of lobster with the bits of conch and vegetables. The sauce, mild to the point of tasting neutral, emphasizes the briny flavors of the seafood.

Some of the same shellfish mingle in the wonderfully savory “special seafood soup,” based not on the usual fish stock but on a rich, warming chicken broth. Although the flavor of the broth is notably robust, the soup nonetheless takes a delicate approach, and is only slightly thickened with a bit of beaten egg white; vegetables, straw mushrooms and slices of poached chicken breast fill out the bowl, which will serve two diners lavishly and will suffice for four.

Dishes that combine meat with seafood are common in Chinese cooking. One that does so quite handsomely at Star House is the stir-fry of scallops and thinly sliced beef, dressed with assorted vegetables, moistened with a bit of full-bodied brown sauce and dumped, at the table on a hot metal platter so that the whole sizzles musically. In theory, the scallops should be rather mute in flavor contrasted with the beef, but, somehow, their flavor remains distinct and pleasing.

Among offerings that the menu notes as specialties, the chan - pi beef is an especially tasty version of a dish more commonly known as “orange flavor beef.” Lightly battered and crisply fried, the thinly sliced beef forms a meaty background for the spectacular play of flavors effected by the sweet but somewhat fiery sauce, and the thick, pungent shreds of orange peel woven aromatically through the dish. This preparation has considerable bite to it.

Another dish with a definite bite would be the shrimp Hunan, which includes the garlic and black bean sauce of Cantonese seafood cookery but spices the combination with red peppers and potent jalapenos.

For an entirely different effect, try the “crystal” shrimp, a simple but quite refined preparation of clear, subtly flavored sauce garnished with water chestnuts. It is one of those dishes in which the principal elements taste, as the French say, “like themselves.”

Star House

740 Nordahl Road., San Marcos

Calls: 489-6223

Hours: Lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday, closed Sunday

Cost: Most entrees $5.95 to $12.95; dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, about $25 to $40.