The Tao of Dough

The coolest thing about the Monterey Park Chinese restaurant Dumpling Master is probably its name, which sounds like the title of a Hong Kong martial arts movie where the hero regretfully lays down his skeins of noodle dough in order to avenge the death of his sister. I like to imagine the chef as an elderly man, beard down to his chest, rolling out dough to a contemplative melody from a plucked pi pa , stuffing crunchy bits of shrimp into delicate pasta sheets with the practiced long fingers of an er hu virtuoso or tai chi wizard or something. If the chef is a 23-year-old heavy-metal fan who likes to watch Oprah as she works, I don’t want to know.

(There actually is a popular series of Japanese martial-arts flicks called “Iron Chef,” in which the chef each time comes to the rescue from behind the stoves of a different kitchen, though the videotapes don’t have subtitles and I’ve never been able to get through more than a few minutes of any of them. As far as I know, the Iron Chef doesn’t have a restaurant around here, though there used to be a fair-to-middling Korean barbecue buffet in El Monte named Iron Lady.)

Dumpling Master is located in a strip mall behind the equally splendidly named supermarket Shun Fat, the usual L-shaped San Gabriel Valley dining room with Formica and greenish fluorescent light, one glass-front icebox filled with cold soda and another with chilled tofu and smoked pigs’ ear salads, a couple of wall banners listing the day’s specials, a dozen or so tables set with bowls and spoons and jars of the house’s sneaky-hot chile oil with black beans. A basic Taiwanese deli of the type made popular by the Mandarin Deli chain, the restaurant buzzes with customers slurping down giant bowls of beef noodles, platters of bean curd with minced pork and chile, hubcapsful of the restaurant’s well-known creamy corn soup, which tastes remarkably like something your Aunt Fanny may have made for lunch back in Iowa.

A specialty of the place is deep-fried pork chops, brown and crunchy, slightly sweet where the pork’s juices have caramelized and coated with a salt crust just spicy enough to tingle. “Potherb,” home-preserved mustard greens of sorts, can be had stir-fried with shredded bits of pork . . . or better, with fresh, sweet soybeans, in a dish that suggests more subtleties of green than a Jennifer Bartlett painting. Gently smoked chicken legs are fine, slightly oily; salt-cured duck legs are sharp and firm.

If you remember to specify handmade noodles, you’ll get thick, wheaty dense things the thickness of fan belts, fresh enough to soak up sauce yet developed enough to retain texture, the kind of noodle that would seem to have everything going against it except that it tastes so good. The handmade noodles come in an intense pork broth garnished with a salt-fried pork chop, in a powerfully gamy beef stew, with fried pork and potherb, in a thick, eggy broth--the “special combination” noodle soup--with the flavor of a really fine hot-and-sour soup.

But essentially--this being Dumpling Master and everything--you might as well have some dumplings, doughy boiled pork dumplings, boiled shrimp dumplings with pork and a clear seafood taste, thin-skinned pan-fried dumplings, crisp on the outside, spurtingly juicy within, that are in their way as good as the famous ones at Mandarin Deli. And don’t leave without at least one order of scallion pancakes. Of all the florishes of the dumpling maker’s art, I might like scallion pancakes the best: thick scallion pancakes and thin scallion pancakes, scallion pancakes dusted with sesame seeds and scallion pancakes spiked with diced hot chiles, even the doughy scallion pancakes they sell in the frozen-food aisle of Chinese supermarkets, which you heat in a toaster like Pop Tarts. Like a bad Elmore Leonard novel, a bad scallion pancake is still pretty hard to resist. Dumpling Master’s scallion pie--crisp wheat pancakes studded with chopped green onion, thin and crackly as sheets of vellum--are the perfect vehicle for sopping up chile oil with a splash of vinegar.

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What to Get

Deep-fried pork chops, potherb with soybeans, hand-made noodles, scallion pancakes

Where to Go

Dumpling Master, 423 N. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park, (818) 458-8689. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; 5 to 9 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $10-16.