It Pays to Dive Into Pearl Ocean for Chinese and Vietnamese Dishes

Pearl Ocean is a pint-sized Chinese and Vietnamese takeout on East Coast Highway in Corona del Mar. You could call it a fish out of water.

Lucky for us. This inauspicious Oriental fast-food restaurant serves up a spate of authentic Chinese and Vietnamese dishes, dishes you normally have to trek up to Little Saigon to find.

Drive down Bolsa Avenue in the city of Westminster, and you run across dozens of these places, steam-table storefronts with a line of woks blazing constantly. This is the first such place I’ve seen this far south. Perhaps it portends a trend.

I should mention that Pearl Ocean’s prices are, for this area, almost ridiculous. Four of us dined on dishes like Vietnamese spring rolls, orange chicken, kung pao chicken, barbecued pork, sauteed vegetables, fried and steamed rice for only $20, a recession busting sum if there ever was one.

What actually first caught my eye was the Pay Point sign on the front door, a phenomenon increasingly attractive to small restaurants don’t want to handle too much cash. Pay Point is the system by which you run your ATM card or credit card through a machine and the account is automatically debited, just like in a gas station.

Start any order here with Pearl Ocean’s refreshing goi cuon (Vietnamese spring rolls), shrimp, mint, wispy rice noodles and a diaphanous rice flour skin, all rolled up into see-through, eight-inch cylinders. Because goi cuon are steamed and served cold, they contain no oil and have a near magical lightness. Eat them with the mild peanut sauce the restaurant packages in little plastic sauce cups.

You won’t have to worry about MSG here, either. Pearl Ocean doesn’t use the stuff. (And that’s one thing that sets it apart from most of its counterparts in Little Saigon.) Chinese dishes tend to be steam-table ready, so if you want your food cooked to order, you’ll have to figure out what isn’t on the steam table. Then watch the restaurant’s tiny brigade spring into action, manning the woks at near light speed.

Tender, crunchy barbecued pork is prepared Vietnamese style on a hibachi grill, glazed ever so slightly with sugar and blackened around the edges. It’s great. Orange chicken, from the steam table, had a light cornstarch batter and the mild flavor of bittersweet orange, but didn’t cloy like many I’ve tried. I forgot to pay the 25 cents extra for peanuts in the kung pao chicken, and got a rather bland mass of boned chicken and cut up green pepper.

One steam-table star, though, is fried rice, a lightly fried, evenly browned rice lively with carrots, peas and tiny bits of egg. Leftover rice dries out somewhat, resulting in a less oily version. Cooked to order, I like it less. This addictive stuff is $2 for a medium-sized carton. That’s another nice thing about Pearl Ocean. Most dishes are available in medium- or large-sized cartons, so you don’t have to order more than you can reasonably eat.

Pearl Ocean is inexpensive. Hot appetizers are 75 cents to $3.75. A la carte dishes are from $1 to $3.75 (regular size), $5.25 to $5.75 (large size).

* PEARL OCEAN

2754 E. Coast Highway, Corona Del Mar.

(714) 644-6289.

Open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday, 4 to 9 p.m.

VISA and MasterCard accepted.