RESTAURANTS : Dim Sum Stands Out at Kimsu

Add Kimsu Seafood Restaurant to the list of big, brash dining establishments heralding Little Saigon’s latest eastward expansion down Bolsa. This restaurant, in Westminster just across the Santa Ana city line, is the newest member in a category I call Southeast Asian Chinese.

Like other Southeast Asian Chinese places, it’s often a puzzling dining experience. Look to the menu for your first clue. Individual dishes are listed in four languages: English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian. Such multiculturalism is admirable when a kitchen is experienced enough to make the best of it. Elements of south Asian cooking such as lemon grass or ginger add pep and dimension to stir-fries, and the artful fresh vegetable garnishes that distinguish Vietnamese cooking in particular are wonderfully summery.

Too bad Kimsu’s cooking isn’t always that accomplished. Dishes here are rarely short on flavor, but sometimes you don’t think of flavor--you think of flavors , not uniting but working at cross-purposes. A plate of fresh clams loses much of its natural essence to an excess of sauce and an inadvisable amount of spice. Golden lion crab, named for the mythical creature that the restaurant has chosen as its symbol, is unpleasantly sweet.

The dining room fairly bustles at lunch and on weekends. If you want the best out of Kimsu, come for lunch, when the restaurant serves a first-class selection of dim sum. Kimsu’s versions of the classic tea pastries and savories tend to be small and delicate, kin to the peerless dim sum served in Hong Kong. The familiar har gow and shiu mai are brilliant, the soft, steaming noodle wrappers filled with either minced shrimp or fatty chopped pork. The selection here rivals that of larger dim sum emporia in the San Gabriel Valley, and expect more than an occasional surprise to roll by on the sturdy metal carts.

Lo mai gai are folded lotus leaves concealing a delicious mixture of sticky rice, Chinese sausage and steamed chicken. Cheung fan are various meats such as barbecued pork, sliced beef brisket and whole steamed shrimp in mouthwatering rice noodle wrappers. Bold diners can tackle ngap cheung , braised duck feet. My favorite is a diaphanous rice flour envelope called fun gor with a complex mixture of peanut, shrimp, pork, black mushroom and chopped bamboo shoot.

Dinners are complex affairs too, usually centering around massive platters of fresh seafood. Toward the back of the restaurant is a series of fish tanks built into the wall that separates the dining room from the kitchen. Choose carefully and you might just get lucky. I’ve had excellent steamed shrimp here, but the whole tilapia steamed with ginger and green onion was disappointing. It came to the table bland and mealy.

I love to begin a festive Chinese meal with cold dishes, and I wish they were among the restaurant’s strengths. Seven-star cold platter is impressive to look at--an architectural marvel of cold meats and marinated fish, the top crowned by a circle of neatly arranged sweet shrimp. It’s a dazzler until you discover what’s underneath: a pile of Vietnamese-style jellied beef and mortadella-like strips of the pork-based cold cut that the Vietnamese call pa^te--in brief, ordinary sandwich-type meats. Good jellyfish and a few icy elephant clams almost save the platter. The dish does not merit its hefty $22 price tag, though ($29 for a large platter).

Soups make wonderful second courses. The unusual golden lion fish ball and shrimp ball soup is a tangy seaweed-and-spinach-flavored broth, loaded up with bizarre, terrific, golf-ball-sized fish and shrimp. Another good choice is hot-and-sour catfish soup, exactly as pungent as what you get in purely Vietnamese places further west on Bolsa. There are more than a dozen other soups, including several based on pricey shark’s fin.

If you have time to plan a dinner here, consider Peking duck. This duck is a masterpiece of lacquered skin, remarkably lean meat and soft bones, waiting to be carved up and served inside homemade crepes with scallions and pungent plum sauce. If the duck’s $22.95 price tag puts you off, go for the house special quail. The birds are perfectly fried to a juicy crispness and served with spiced salt. At $3 per quail, this is easily the menu’s greatest bargain.

A wide variety of dishes are available. Whole fish can be anything from black perch to rock cod or catfish. Vegetables such as pea shoots ( dao mieu ) or leaf spinach are wok fried and served simply. When in season, try the slightly bitter, pleasingly textured vegetable the menu lists under its Cantonese name, on choy .

Because Kimsu caters to a largely Southeast Asian clientele, there are dishes such as frog legs with lemon grass and beef loc-lac (French-style sizzling beef with garlic), reflecting the long French presence in the area. Look for down-home Cantonese specialties here, too. Dragon and phoenix ye fu noodle pairs long, soft yellow egg noodles with stir-fried chicken and sauteed shrimp. Salted fish and crab fried rice is a pungent, bracing rice dish definitely not for anyone who uses the word fishy.

Come to Kimsu Seafood Restaurant with several friends, the better to help you fill out one of the restaurant’s many round tables.

Kimsu is moderate to expensive. Appetizers and cold dishes are $3.50 to $29. Soups are $6.25 to $13.95. Seafoods are $1.50 to $24.95, possibly higher for seasonal delicacies such as lobster and whole fish. Rice dishes are $6.25 to $7.95.

* KIMSU SEAFOOD RESTAURANT

* 10530-A Bolsa Ave., Westminster.

* (714) 554-6261.

* Open 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday.

* MasterCard and Visa.