Ying & Yang Chow

One of the astonishing things about browsing through the hundreds of Asian restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley is how often you come across a place that serves not just an unusual dish or two, but a whole cuisine that may be new to you--an unusually Fujian-influenced Taiwanese seafood menu or perhaps a kind of noodleshop cooking practically unknown outside Inner Mongolia. No mini-mall restaurant is so small that it may not surprise you; no opulent wedding-banquet menu can safely be ignored.

Silver Wing is a tiny place in a mall with a Vietnamese supermarket near the far edge of Alhambra, one mirror-walled restaurant among many, with a cold case for salads and a dozen tidy tables. Even if you have been to Silver Wing five times, you may not be able to tell it apart from the other restaurants in the strip without referring to the photocopied menu taped up in a window. But Silver Wing is probably the only place in the area specializing in the famous dumplings and noodles and buns of Yangzhou, a small city north of Shanghai, and the breakfast is as delicious as you can imagine. (The breakfast menu is in Chinese, but a waitress will be glad to translate.)

Check it out some weekend around noon. Silver Wing is suddenly crowded with people eating dumplings; slurping from big, steaming bowls of soy milk; gnawing on freshly fried Chinese crullers that look a little like churros that have been surgically joined at the waist; digging into Chinese spaghetti. Salted soy milk, like a suspension of pulverized bean curd flavored strongly with pepper and black vinegar, is garnished with sliced crullers and a tiny dice of pungent, salt-preserved vegetables; sweet soy milk is bland, slightly chalky, subtly flavored, a cream-smooth analog to the hot tofu so popular at dim sum lunches. (Avoid the rice soup, which is just that: unflavored rice soup.) At breakfast there are also hot ovals of flaky sesame bread, stuffed with thin, cool slices of gelatinous beef or spiced pork, crunchy and soft and chewy all at once.

What are called “steamed slice rolls”--ask for fried steamed slice rolls--are little beehive-shaped things that are sweet like doughnuts, crunchy-crusted and dusted with cinnamon sugar. Cat’s-ear noodles--unfortunately listed on the typo-ridden menu as “stir-fried sliced douch with vegetables”--are firm, delicious things that actually do look a bit like cat’s ears, sauteed with the eggs, meat, crunchy black fungus and mushrooms you might associate with great mu shu pork. Dry bean curd Yangchow-style may be the single best dish in the restaurant, the thinnest julienne strips of dry tofu, the texture of soft cheese, tossed with tiny shreds of white-meat chicken, Chinese ham and a little black vinegar, a dish you do not eat so much as inhale.

Silver Wing serves a terrific version of the Yangchow region’s famous lion’s head meat dumplings--baseball-size lumps of fat minced pork cooked slowly in a gravy of stock and soy, with a flavor whose intensity belies the meatballs’ lightness. Little bamboo steamersful of cut up spareribs, heady with wine and ginger, are steamed under a thick coat of coarse rice crumbs and sit on a bed of yams. The usual Chinese vegetables are good--string beans fried with salty crumbles of pork, spicy eggplant--and there is a wonderful, delicate dish of salted vegetables sauteed with fresh soybeans and fragile tendrils of tofu skin.

There are almost too many kinds of dumplings to count: shiu mai shaped like little nuclear cooling towers, stuffed with a savory mince of pine nuts, pork and sticky rice; incredible pan-fried pork bao , juicy and gingery, garnished with chopped scallions; dumplings stuffed with a fragrant mince of preserved vegetables and pork; green-onion pancakes (just OK); garlicky pan-fried dumplings; wonderful sweet dumplings stuffed with chopped dates. I have been to Silver Wing maybe eight times in the last couple of months, and I have tried to order a different kind of dumpling on each visit, but I have barely made a dent in the menu.

* Silver Wing: 1265 E. Valley Blvd., Alhambra (in Quang Hoa shopping center), (818) 308-1890. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Lunch or dinner for two, $10-$18.