Fish-Head Quarters

Of the many, many Asian restaurants on Las Tunas Drive in San Gabriel, at least half of which are wonderful, I find myself returning to the Vietnamese noodle shop Golden Deli, possibly because a craving for Golden Deli’s perfect spring rolls comes up a little more often than a longing for seven-course beef dinners or Taiwanese three-glass chicken, but also because the French-drip coffee is good and the scene is pretty groovy. This isn’t an original assessment: The number of people waiting to get a table at the noodle shop often approaches the number of people inside.

Golden Deli, though, has a major flaw--in the French manner, it is closed most of August. Three times at least this summer, I sort of randomly headed toward the deli around lunchtime, remembered it was closed and headed for other places on the street. Among them were Luong Hai Ky (for Chiu Chow-style won ton noodles) and the Bavarian Inn (for schnitzel and beer). But the nicest surprise was the Malaysian restaurant Yazmin, a restaurant I’d kind of written off because the chef had moved on and the food hadn’t been as sharp as it once was. At Yazmin, I had one of the nicest meals I’ve had all year.

Conventional wisdom has it that good restaurants only get better with time, which is possibly true in those areas of France where a chef-patron will stay in the same kitchen for 20 years, but hardly so in a volatile city such as Los Angeles. Restaurants have their natural cycles here: owners change, restaurants overextend themselves, and chefs abandon one place for another, taking with them entire kitchen crews. But some restaurants do get better.

Yazmin had grown since I’d been there last, expanding from one tiny room into the travel agency next door, picking up high ceilings and a collection of shadow puppets, lengthening its small menu. Service was a little more formal too.

And the food . . . rojak salad, a peanut-sprinkled toss of sliced fruits and vegetables in a pungent dressing of shrimp paste and sweet, thick Malaysian soy, was astonishing: jicama so crisp you could hear the crunching across the room, mango and papaya at the sweet, soft height of late-summer ripeness, snapping-fresh cucumber, fried cubes of tofu as new-wave croutons, and a subtle undercurrent of raw chile heat. I had eaten rojak just a couple of days earlier at a faintly related Old Town Pasadena Malaysian restaurant I had thought I liked better than Yazmin, but this salad was in another league.

There was crunchy-skinned fried chicken with a musky, hot tomato glaze. There was fresh coconut water and mango juice to drink. Char kuei teow , a sort of fried Malaysian-Chinese analogue to the Cantonese rice noodles chow fun , were swell, glutinous and chewy and crisped black at the edges, heavily garlicked, sweetened with thick soy, every bit the high-calorie Singapore craving they’re reputed to be. Yazmin was suddenly worth a journey of its own.

And aside from a dryish fried fish with chile, a dish of fried okra slimy enough to overcome its sauce of ground shrimp, and a dull stir-fried chicken with tomato--each of which, oddly enough, has the word “sambal” somewhere in its name--more or less everything here has been good: five-spice-marinated pork wrapped in a tofu skin and deep-fried, the little Malaysian empanadas called curry puffs, a dish of “Indian-style” mee goreng that is essentially egg noodles fried with homemade ketchup but is pretty delicious with a dab of chile sauce.

Specials have included a steamed cake of yams and pounded rice, topped with a curl of burnt onion and a sprinkling of chewy dried shrimp, like what you dream is in those little bamboo baskets when you try a new dim sum place; a clay pot filled with a beef stew almost like a black, carrot-rich Malaysian pot au feu violently flavored with lemon grass, cumin and chile; bean curd sheets and fish-cake-stuffed tofu served with braised vegetables in a mild, yellow curry instead of the usual bean sauce.

I even liked the fish head curry, not a colorful name for a dumpling or something taken from Malaysian folklore but an actual, large fish head, loaded with secret pockets of gelatinous meat, floating in a giant bowl of musky coconut curry. If the citizens of San Gabriel can get past the hard, squirmy reality of nibbling on a fish head, the dish might become as popular as spring rolls, in which case Yazmin could also close in August. Then we’d be back to schnitzel.

* Yazmin Malaysian Restaurant

706 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (818) 308-2036. Open Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 9:30 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Lunch specials $3.95; dinner for two, food only, $13-$20.