Tried and True

The Valley’s newest mega-Chinese restaurant, Super Wok, is a converted Pizza Hut spacious enough to ride a horse through. Not that you’d want to have a horse trot over this gorgeous peacock-blue carpet through a maze of blond wood tables. But you could.

It serves basic, satisfying Chinese cooking, perhaps underspiced but always fresh, well-prepared and as light on the oil as culinary law allows. And MSG has been banned.

My only complaint with Super Wok--owned by veterans of respected restaurants such as Mon Kee and the Sam Woo chain--is a complete lack of daring. The menu might have been generated from a market study of successful big-city Chinese restaurants. You have the usual chicken, beef, pork and shrimp dishes, plus faux-Chinese combos like Three Ingredient Taste, a scallop, shrimp and chicken medley that you are about as likely to find in an authentic Chinese context as Moe, Larry and Curly. But you do not find such Chinatown staples as squid, clams and gammon.

About as daring as it gets at appetizer time is minced chicken, water chestnuts and crispy rice noodles, eaten in lettuce-leaf scoops with a thick plum sauce. This is a fine version of a true Cantonese dish.

Good old pot stickers, though, need no improvement. You get half a dozen pan-fried dumplings with moist, crunchy skins and dense fillings of minced pork. Make sure to ask for a cruet of rice vinegar and a side dish of spicy fermented black bean chile sauce (lat chiu).

The sticky red ribs are throwbacks to the Chinese restaurants of your youth. Super Wok uses baby backs exclusively, and the meat is sweet and so tender it practically falls from the bone.

The pot stickers and ribs are just about flawless. Not so some of the other dishes, such as the Sichuan wontons, which come clumped together in a rice bowl, about eight to an order. They’re a bit doughy because they have a double wrapper of dough. This is one case where you don’t want the pasta to be served al dente. Alas, it is.

Soup portions are huge, and hugely filling. The hot and sour soup is a tame version made with shredded chicken instead of the usual pork, and lots of tofu. Chicken corn soup is an egg flower soup, appealingly thickened, with minced chicken, sweet corn and peas.

The meat and vegetable dishes are mostly familiar. The special beef and special shrimps may not be unusual, but both are great eating. The beef dish is a platter of sliced filet mignon coated with butter, black pepper and a dark sauce that contains, among other things, soy sauce, ginger and rice vinegar, and then stir-fried. The shrimps, a huge helping, are deveined and prepared the same way, except that the sauce caramelizes more heavily on the sliced beef.

There are some outstanding vegetarian dishes. The “braised” string beans don’t lose a bit of their natural crunchiness while being stir-fried with garlic and pickled radishes. Sichuan spicy eggplant, partly peeled, is wokked to a firm but tender texture in a garlicky brown sauce. Sauteed spinach is nicely turned in oil and garlic.

The only noodle options at the moment are mushy lo mein noodles or deep-fried chow mein noodles. The restaurant is missing a bet here: Neither is remotely as appealing as the chow fun rice noodles popular in authentic Cantonese restaurants throughout the Southland.

Super Wok is already acceptable, and it has the potential to improve; it’s certainly an establishment with an eye on the future. The restaurant is currently setting up a Web site in order to expedite advance orders and home delivery, and should be online sometime this month.

BE THERE

Super Wok, 5418 Reseda Blvd., Tarzana. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. daily. Dinner for two, $23-$35. Suggested dishes: pot stickers, $4.95; minced chicken in lettuce cups, $5.95; braised string beans, $7.95; Super Wok special beef, $8.95; Super Wok special shrimps, $10.95. Beer and wine only. Parking lot. All major cards. (818) 342-6383.