Daring Fare Stands Up at Five Feet

A little more than a decade ago, a few daring chefs had the radical idea of combining European and Asian techniques and ingredients. Critics, by and large, were awe-struck. Today, the daring idea has become a widespread movement, but Five Feet continues to surprise us.

When chef Michael Kang first opened this drafty-looking, art-filled restaurant in Laguna Beach, there were inevitable comparisons to a restaurant called Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, where Wolfgang Puck was making big waves redefining Euro-Asian cooking. I’ve never understood the comparison. While both restaurants do a lot of Euro-Asian experimentation, I’ve regarded Chinois from the start as a hybrid that includes not only Chinese but Japanese, French and California cuisines in the mix.

Five Feet is a different story. This place started life firmly rooted in China, then metamorphosed into a restaurant influenced by New Mexico, Italy, Hawaii and even Louisiana.

The place comes by its pedigree honestly. Chef/owner Michael Kang is Chinese American, meaning pot stickers and kung pao chicken are as much a part of his cooking as his Delmonico steak and salmon carpaccio. Over time, Kang has developed a playful, original cooking style. Where else do you get hot lemon potato chips with your vegetable soup, or a combination such as lamb with spiced tofu and balsamic vinegar?

The restaurant has matured in other ways during the past few years. The snappy service, once arrogant, is now both informed and efficient, and the kitchen is faster than I remember. One more plus is the wine list, which is patrician in the extreme, rich with top-drawer French and California wines. Heady stuff if money is no object.

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The ambience hasn’t much budged, though. It’s still what I’d call terminally hip, Laguna’s homage to minimalism. With its bare cement walls, exposed ceiling ducts, vents and jutting shapes of corrugated metal, Five Feet looks more like an industrial loft space somewhere in East L.A. than a South County dining room. A pencil sketch of a frantic crowd scene covers up one of the walls; other spaces showcase the avant-garde works of local artists.

Five Feet’s gallery look is probably a major reason for the restaurant’s distinctive clientele, in large part artists, eccentrics and stylish office types. You see more of the last category on Fridays, the one day of the week the restaurant opens for lunch. I mention this because lunch is a bargain.

The menu changes daily, but you can always count on finding Mama Kang’s pot stickers, which are simply the best pot stickers I’ve tasted: golden brown on all sides, filled with a dense, juicy meat stuffing and a served with a delicate, even ethereal, soy-ginger dipping sauce.

The crisp-skinned goat cheese won tons are another treat that’s always around, and you might get lucky and find goat-cheese-stuffed zucchini blossoms on the menu. These lightly fried little purses of complex flavors have the same filling as the won tons--goat cheese and chopped walnuts--but they’re particularly irresistible.

The salads are creative, too. One combines blackened Hawaiian ahi sashimi, mesclun greens and an oddly contrasting papaya-mint vinaigrette. Another features baby spinach, lobster gyoza (Japanese pot stickers) and a dry mustard vinaigrette.

Entrees tend to be a touch lighter at lunch. Grab duet of salmon if you see it. It’s a pretty plate lined with king salmon carpaccio on which rests a sauteed medallion of peppered salmon garnished with sesame-toasted figs in warm lemon tarragon vinaigrette.

As for the New Zealand lamb rack, its sauce may be over-reduced, but with its complement of braised spinach and a galette-like potato pancake, this is a terrific plate of food for $13.50.

If there is one problem with this kitchen, it is a tendency to complicate. New Zealand John Dory can be a thing of beauty even without a chili-Parmesan crust, a bed of ratatouille vegetables, some rubbery fried gnocchi and a spicy lobster jus . And who among us really wants to brave Hawaiian ahi wrapped in nori seaweed with crab meat, avocado, wasabi , Asian mango papaya chow chow, crazy ponzu sauce and Chinese spaghetti?

Basics are best. Salt-and-pepper popcorn of rock shrimp and scallops, a fiery Cajun recipe right off the bayou, makes a terrific first course.

The elegant “golden cup” is eaten in the hollow of lettuce leaves smeared with plum sauce, a mixture of chicken, pine nuts, fried rice noodles and finely minced Chinese vegetables.

And Five Feet plays it straight with its fresh mussel and clam appetizer. The seafood is wok-seared in a spicy, unctuous black bean sauce, identical to what you’d get in any big-city Chinatown.

Meat eaters might want to sample the fine prime New York steak, gussied up with a wild mushroom sauce and served with meaty grilled portobello mushrooms. Fresh fish, such as mahi-mahi, halibut or that infamous ahi, comes in various globe-spanning incarnations.

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One evening, mahi-mahi was cooked in a three-pepper (serrano, New Mexico and chipotle) chili sauce, a Southwestern sort of dish more appropriate to Kachina across the street. Another evening the waiter suggested halibut in a macadamia crust with a pineapple-litchi sauce. You never know what to expect in this place.

Except at dessert, when you know not to expect anything earth-shattering. This is the most mundane feature of Five Feet. The best among them is probably a homemade peanut butter ice cream pie, with the coarse creme brulee lagging behind.

But I actually like to order the brulee , simply to watch the waiter finishing off the top with a real live blowtorch. Everybody’s an artist in this town, I swear.

Five Feet is expensive. Starters are $4.95 to $9.50. Entrees are $13.95 to $23.95.

* FIVE FEET

* 328 Gleneyre St., Laguna Beach.

* (714) 497-4955.

* Open for lunch on Fridays only, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. For dinner Sunday through Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday till 11 p.m.

* All major cards accepted.