Taiwan Gourmet Has Cause to Boast

The Year of the Rat is upon us. Usher it in with a visit to O.C.’s best new Chinese restaurant, Taiwan Gourmet.

Normally you should be wary of restaurants that grant themselves self-congratulatory epithets such as “gourmet,” but in this case the bragging is justified. Owner Lily Yiu and chef Fu Yun come to their Huntington Beach location from the San Gabriel Valley, where they operated the popular Sunny Dragon.

Apparently Huntington Beach and environs now has a large enough native Chinese population to support an authentic Chinese restaurant. Most of the clientele here are Chinese families, and the management clearly has geared the menu to them.

By default, non-Chinese patrons are handed a picture menu about one-third as extensive as the menu distributed to Asian customers. If they give you the picture menu, make sure to ask for the bilingual main menu or you’ll be missing out on dozens of the best Chinese dishes in the Southland.

Taiwan Gourmet’s bright-lights-big-city decor is straight up and simple: lots of cool green, glass tops on most tables (the round family style tables for six or more do not have them), a huge Chinese bas-relief on the rear wall, black lacquer chairs with thick, soft cushions. This is also one of the friendliest Chinese restaurants around. The solicitous waiters wear tuxedos and make every effort to please.

The cooking is mostly Taiwan-style, heavily influenced by neighboring Shanghai and also by Japan, which occupied the island for the better part of this century. But Taiwan Gourmet also offers fare from Canton, Hunan and other provinces.

All meals commence with tiny dishes of crisply fried peanuts, sweet pickled cabbage and a remarkable combination of chopped green chili, fermented black soy beans and finely minced tofu. The main menu appetizers are mostly Shanghainese cold dishes such as sweet fried eel, spicy beef tendon marinated in rice wine and the wonderful crispy anchovy, perfect for downing (bones and all) with cold draughts of Taiwanese beer.

The soups are exotic, as are the breads and pastries you can order to complement them. Try a green onion pancake with your dried beef and vegetable potage, one of the thicker and more intensely flavored Chinese soups available. The pancake is a multilayered flat bread, browned on the surface and flecked with green onions between each layer.

Or order Shanghai special pastry to go with the dried bean curd and smoked pork soup. This clear soup is dominated by the flavor of Chinese bacon (similar to Canadian bacon) and the flaky Shanghai pastry fairly bursts with bacon and chopped leek.

In the Chinese alphabet, the character for “pork” is synonymous with “meat,” and pork is, appropriately, the most important meat served here.

The braised pork leg (served skin on) is miraculously tender, ruddy meat darkened with soy sauce. Smoked pork Hunan-style is lean chunks of meat penetrated by the perfumes of tea leaves and camphor, sauteed with a flurry of onions and leeks.

Honey ham, another specialty of the province of Hunan, is a salty, Virginia-style country ham that’s cut into thin squares. Here, the saltiness of the ham is offset by a sticky honey sauce. Make sandwiches out of it using plain steamed buns.

Don’t let yourself be daunted by the Chinese-language menu insert. Two of the dishes on it are musts. The first is san pei ji, a clay pot chicken dish. The essence of san pei ji is little pieces of boneless, dry-sauteed chicken, thoroughly infused with star anise. You might not guess one of the ingredients, however. As the waiter set down our clay pot, he said, “There is duck tongue in the pot. Is that OK?” If you don’t care for these slightly gelatinous, string bean-sized curiosities, it’s easy to eat around the duck tongues.

The dish I will come back here for again and again is do shoe sheh yu, chef Yun’s take on a classic fish preparation. Do shoe sheh yu is brought out ceremoniously with a flame underneath the dish to keep the bubbling liquid hot.

The contents are two round pieces of yellowtail topped with a sprinkling of deep-fried fermented yellow bean. The waiters tell me the dish is Taiwanese, but it reminds me of a famous Hunan-style dish where fish comes to the table completely covered in molten beans.

The light, lively cha mi fen, also from the Chinese-language menu, is angel hair pasta deftly stir-fried with cabbage, pork and tree-ear mushrooms. General Tso’s chicken may be heavy on the cornstarch, but these man-sized chunks of spicy fried chicken are as perfectly browned as any chicken I’ve had lately.

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Among the best vegetable dishes is braised bean curd Shanghai-style: tofu in a piquant red sauce along with minced mushrooms and a few slices of pork. In the dish called “dried sauteed string beans,” the string beans pop when you bite into them. Black mushrooms with vegetable, a tedious dish in most suburban Chinese restaurants, is exemplary. The baby bok choy is fresh, the dung goo mushrooms well textured, and a bonus portion of fresh bamboo is thrown in at the last second.

If the waiters take a shine to you, you’ll probably get a complimentary dessert, such as a compote of red beans or a tiny bowl of tapioca pudding. Otherwise there will be orange slices, and maybe even a fortune cookie or two, if that is your pleasure.

I haven’t had a single bad dish in this restaurant. The Year of the Rat is off to an auspicious start; I feel lucky already.

Taiwan Gourmet is moderately priced. Appetizers and soups are $4.95 to $15.95. Main dishes are $4.95 to $15.95.

* Taiwan Gourmet

* 16883 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach.

* (714) 848-4940.

* Lunch daily, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Dinner nightly, 5:30-10 p.m.

* Visa, MasterCard and American Express.