RESTAURANT REVIEW : Golden Dragon’s Setting Outpaces Its Cuisine : The decor is ambitious--if only the food could meet it. All too often bland and oily sauces mar the dishes.

Golden China was for years situated on lower Seaward Avenue in Ventura, barely ablock from the sea, out of the stream of things but for beach visitors and Pierpont-area locals who sought it out. Now it’s moved up the street, but an entire world away: into the huge, vaulted space once occupied by Charlie Brown’s at Seaward and the Ventura Freeway.

Intact is the menu, a standard-issue mammoth of 134 selections with an aim-to-please ethic that suggests, at every turn: We’ll do everything and anything to please you.

The environment here is a part of that ambition. Walk down the stairs upon entering and note the vast aquariums on the left, with all manner of happy cobalt, pink and yellow fish menaced by the desultory but lethal lion fish, his radial spikes ready to nick and kill.

Then, decide carefully whether you want to sit near the central waterfalls--a kitschy but lovely installation of rocks and greenery and bubbling water that offers a blanket of white noise to anyone within 20 feet. If privacy is more your thing, ask for a table along the rear windows. Yes, you’ll look out over the other happening spot at this highway location, El Torito, but nighttime reduces its lights to a distant twinkle and between is a manicured green courtyard with a lone, graceful tree, the better to meditate by.

If only the food could reliably match the setting. On a good night, it can, and that’s the good news.

But all too often the dishes are laden with gelatinous, bland and oily sauces that mar rather than complement--and certain among the fried offerings are calcified to an unpalatable hardness and weight. What is most astonishing, however, is that the very best dishes here are by far the most difficult to achieve, creating the impression that common fare--shrimp in curry sauce or Kung Pao chicken, for example--is wanting for the attention of the real pros lurking about in the kitchen.

Start with an order of pot stickers ($5.95), plump with lovely fresh ground meats and seared nicely on one side of the dough; they are fresh, lightly seasoned and restorative. But avoid egg rolls ($3.95), which in recent visits bore a slightly metallic flavor and suffered from blandness. Likewise, a signature dish of any Chinese restaurant--hot and sour soup ($4.25)--suffers terribly from lack of spice and flavor, seasoning imbalance and too much thickening.

Teriyaki beef on a stick ($4.95) features first-quality meat, perfectly broiled to retain medium-rare tenderness; but it altogether lacks the flavor of its purported marinade or coating, requiring a sad ketchup-like bailout of soy sauce. Barbecued spareribs ($6.95) are just OK--pale, wan, tender but lacking flavor.

And bean curd with vegetable soup ($3.95)--a brew that should promise delicate transparent broth to enhance the vivid greens and subtle textures within--arrives as a bland and heavy opaque goop, so thickened as to obfuscate all flavors but the woodsy depth of pungent mushrooms.

Among entrees, one of the trickier in the Chinese repertoire--tea-smoked duck ($9.55)--is Golden China’s triumph and truest bargain. A plump fresh bird has been boned, hot-seared and then tea-smoked to retain flavor, texture, succulence. The rosy meat is carved table side and rolled, with a dense and up-to-the-job spicy plum sauce, in thin warm pancakes. (You might consider having some of the thickest parts of the skin removed before the pancakes are rolled, however, as this duck’s fat content would meet anyone’s lipid requirements for a month or more. Reserve perhaps one piece, skin-on, to take in the full range of flavor.)

Chicken in orange peel sauce ($7.95) is quite good, as well: delicate pieces of breast and thigh meat in a bracing brown sauce bearing the heat of dried red pepper and the acidic punch of slightly charred citrus cuttings. And bear-foot-shaped bean curd ($8.95), in which giant disks of tofu have been fried and set adrift in a mildly spiced, light brown sauce, is a Gargantuan pleasure: deep in flavor, beautifully assembled and framed by fresh vegetables, and high on the healthful foods index.

But curry shrimp ($8.95), starred on the menu as a spicy offering, is bland: awash in tan sauce from which clear oil pools at the edges. It goes largely uneaten. Sauteed shrimp ($12.95) are a visual delight, peeled and pink and nestled within a giant shell, surrounded by greens and a blush-pink, vegetable-carved flower. Alas, they are tender but slippery in a clear sweet, pointless coating--robbing them not only of flavor but of crispiness from pan or wok treatment.

Captain’s chicken ($8.95), also starred for spiciness, is a bunker of over-fried, hard-to-the-bite dark chicken chunks that lack heat. Seeking the most simple pleasure, a dish of broccoli in hot garlic sauce ($5.55) is ordered, but it, too, suffers from too much of one thing and not enough of another: The broccoli is fresh and perfectly underdone to retain freshness but engulfed in a viscous, near-black sauce that lacks garlic flavor and all but consumes the vegetable.

Service here varies widely. The management is unfailingly pleasant and engaging, roaming the room to chat up customers and ensure that everyone’s happy. But table waiters are at times a bit tardy and lost. That’s well enough if you know where you want to sit and can suffer through some truly lacking dishes for a treatment so special as the tea-smoked duck.

Good things are, after all, hard to find. But for now it’s clear Golden China has some gilding to do before it lives up not only to its ambitious new space but its very name.

Details

* WHAT: Golden China Restaurant.

* WHEN: Open daily 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

* WHERE: 1105 S. Seaward Ave., Ventura.

* HOW MUCH: Dinner for two, food only, from $14 to $50.

* FYI: Major credit cards; food to go.

* CALL: 652-0688 or 652-0689.