Great Balls of Fish

The Chiu Chow Restaurant sits at the bottom end of old Chinatown, near the wishing well, the pagodas, the elaborate decorated neon gateways that have always looked like leftovers from the set of a 1937 costume epic. Tour buses disgorge hordes of Iowans who descend on the back-scratcher merchants. Around the corner, anonymous salons come alive weekday afternoons with the clicking of mah-jongg tiles.

The restaurant has the easiest parking lot in the area; it’s as big with the kung-pao shrimp crowd as it is with the local Chinese. And like most old-Chinatown restaurants, Chiu Chow is thickly populated with tourists, who happily plow through platters of sweet-and-sour pork and cashew chicken as if their ideas about dinner in Chinatown were formed in 1953.

There’s a lot of decent Chiu Chow food in the Los Angeles area, probably because so many Chiu Chow emigrated to California from places like Cambodia and Vietnam. (When you hear people referring to “ethnic Chinese” in Southeast Asia, they’re probably talking about Chiu Chow people.) Chances are good your favorite Thai restaurant is run by Chiu Chows. Chiu Chows operate many of the best noodle shops in town, and the best Malaysian restaurants too.

Chiu Chow cooking may be the most delicate of the Chinese cuisines--cleanly flavored, characterized by ultra-fresh vegetables and fragile water-cooked dishes, seafood light enough to make even refined Hong Kong-style Cantonese cooking seem awkward in comparison. The food at high-end Chiu Chow places--the splendid 888 in San Gabriel, for one--can be as elegant as what you might find at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Provence, if not the Chiu Chow urban center Swatow itself. Chiu Chow snack food is pretty good too: fish balls and leek cakes and pink sticky-rice pastries fried to an exquisite crunch. The Chiu Chows are the masters of goose cookery.

But lately, I’ve become obsessed by a Chiu Chow restaurant--as a matter of fact, The Chiu Chow Restaurant, the oldest such place in Los Angeles--that seems to specialize in some of the less subtle aspects of the cuisine: pomfret sizzled to the texture of Doritos; snow-pea leaves or hollow-stemmed Chinese watercress sauteed with intemperate amounts of garlic; chicken deep-fried until its flesh becomes firm and moist and the mahogany skin acquires the approximate brittleness of the top of a perfect creme bru^lee . Chiu Chow chefs may be renowned for their deftness with steamed food, but the best stuff at this place seems to be pretty much all fried.

Shrimp balls are sort of the Chinese chimichangas : tofu skins wrapped around a forcemeat of chopped shrimp, taro and water chestnuts, sliced, then fried. The taro’s creaminess contrasts with the several levels of crispness; the shrimp’s marine sweetness is brought out by a sticky fruit sauce served alongside as a dip. (Crab balls are pretty much the same thing, but the price of crab meat being what it is, there’s less seafood involved.) Fish-ball noodles, on the other hand, couldn’t be farther from balls--the dish involves fish cake cut into the shape of linguine, then flash-fried with vegetables and a slug of soy.

Most of the Chinese seafood places in town have adapted the salt-and-pepper thing--seafood fried with, you know, salt and pepper--but Chiu Chow does it as well as any, salt-and-pepper squid battered and fried like some chewy, lip-tingling fried calamari; salt-and-pepper crab, fried and tossed with a butter sauce; whole salt-and-pepper shrimp that you munch like potato chips, shell and all.

But if you’re into the delicate water-cooked thing--and you should be--you can have a proper Chiu Chow steamed duck along all the fried stuff, soft, meaty, fragrant with a dozen woody Chinese herbs and ruddy to the bone. In a goose-less Chiu Chow restaurant, you can’t forget to duck.

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What to Get: Shrimp balls; salt and pepper crab; Chiu Chow spiced duck.

Where to Go: Chiu Chow Restaurant, 935 Sun Mun Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-0097. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Beer and wine. Discover, Mastercard and Visa accepted. Validated lot parking. Takeout and lunchtime delivery. $3.95 lunch specials. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$18.