Fine China

Yen Ching is a genteel Chinese restaurant, a fixture in this town since 1980. Owner Ben Tzou is from China’s Shandong province, halfway between Shanghai and Beijing, and you see right away that he is an old-school gentleman. Tzou’s staff is trained to greet all customers warmly. You won’t get a more enthusiastic welcome in any local Chinese restaurant.

This is also a serene place to dine. From the street, it has the appearance of a large Amish barn. But inside, it’s decorated in pastel colors, with Art Deco chandeliers and elegant Chinese paintings. Seating is at semicircular booths upholstered in gray leather. The servers wear snappy gray uniforms, white shirts and crimson bow ties.

If Yen Ching has the look of an old-style suburban Chinese restaurant, so be it. New generation Chinese restaurants may be able to boast a more diverse and authentic menu than Yen Ching. But a good number of them have garish designs, rude staffs and pantries stocked with low-quality ingredients.

The trade-off here is having to content yourself with a sanitized interpretation of northern Chinese cooking, unless you know precisely what to order in advance.

If you have time to plan, Yen Ching’s Peking duck is worth the detour, even though at $32.50 it is by far the most expensive item on the menu. The kitchen insists on 24 hours’ notice. When the duck is presented, you’ll be grateful you had the foresight to order it.

This is a big, beautiful bird, all lacquered skin and lean, juicy meat. Waiters first present it grandly on a wooden plank, then carve it expertly at the table. The skin and meat are rolled up with crepes with scallions and a dark plum sauce. The duck yields eight burrito-sized crepes. If you can round up seven other people, you’ve just gotten one of the world’s great dishes for only $4 per person.

Another crowning glory of Chinese cuisine is shark’s fin soup, and Yen Ching scores big with that one too. Shark’s fin is a gelatinous substance that the Chinese prize highly for texture; it doesn’t provide flavor. Yen Ching prepares a delicious soup base from dried black mushroom and chopped fresh chicken and then thickens the soup with shark’s fin.

One more soup to try is winter melon. Here you get a clear chicken broth laced with smoky Chinese ham and julienned pieces of the pale green, fibrous melon, a squash relative that could easily pass for underripe pumpkin.

I wouldn’t fill up on the workmanlike appetizers, like pot stickers, paper-wrapped chicken and shrimp toast (deep-fried white bread wrapped around chopped shrimp meat). The doughy pot stickers are acceptable thanks to a pleasing minced pork filling. Paper-wrapped chicken served in aluminum foil triangles, however, is bland and mushy, Chinese baby food.

The kitchen’s tendency toward blandness can be sidestepped simply by asking the cooks to make dishes spicier, an important concept when ordering Hunan or Sichuan-style dishes such as twice-cooked pork or dry braised beef.

Twice-cooked pork is a rustic dish made from pork that has been first boiled and then pan-fried with carrots and bamboo shoots. Dry braised beef is marinated pan-fried beef, and both work better when cooked with lots of mouth-numbing fagara pepper. It’s also prudent to request that chefs go easy on sugar and cornstarch, ingredients Yen Ching’s kitchen’s uses with zeal.

Yen Ching’s vegetables are consistently fine. Sauteed spinach is prepared with little more than a drop of oil, a few cloves of garlic and a pile of exquisitely fresh spinach leaves. Dry sauteed string beans are served crisp, the dappled brown beans achieving their color from being tossed around in a wok with ground pork and minced pickled radish. There is hot braised bean curd made from high-quality cubes of fluffy tofu and a meaty brown chile-spiked sauce. The expensive black mushrooms dung goo are braised whole and paired with tender baby bok choy.

The restaurant doesn’t offer much in the way of fish, but it is possible to order an entire rock cod in advance. The kitchen will prepare it any way you request. Otherwise, Yen Ching offers a slew of nondescript shrimp dishes, such as a cloying kung pao shrimp, very ordinary pan-fried shrimp and deep-fried shrimp in an oily batter.

Some dishes, moo shu pork, for instance, are meant to be bland. This version has a nice mix of pork and vegetables filling thin crepes smeared with a sticky plum sauce. You have to expect sweetness in a dish named shredded pork in sweet dark sauce. It’s julienned pork, swimming in a thick brown emulsion sweet enough to give you a toothache. Also be wary of the sugar in tangy beef, which is wok-seared sliced beef flavored with orange peel. I thought I was eating a Creamsicle.

Dinners end with complimentary fresh orange slices, almond cookies and fortune cookies, a practice still common in older Chinese restaurants.

The menu’s one a la carte dessert is candied apple, but it’s not the carny version. Yen Ching plunges hot, sizzling apple slices into a bowl of ice, so that their caramel overcoat becomes a crackling glaze.

Take the plunge yourself at Yen Ching, whenever you’re in the mood for a genteel evening or the splendor of Peking duck. Heck, it even works if you are hankering for that routinely suburban Chinese restaurant experience.

Yen Ching is moderate to expensive. Appetizers are $4.45 to $6.35. Soups are $5.05 to $20. Entrees are $8.15 to $32.50.

BE THERE

Yen Ching. 574 S. Glassell St., Orange. (714) 997-3300. Open 11:30 a.m.- 2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, 4:30-9:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 4:30-10:30 p.m. Friday, noon-10:30 p.m. Saturday and noon-9:30 p.m. Sunday. All major cards.