A Jade Treasure Among Cantonese Eateries

Set in an Art Deco-style building trimmed in pink neon, Jade Ocean is a new restaurant in Alhambra. It’s a smallish place as Cantonese seafood houses go, but with an exceptionally friendly and accommodating staff. If you can’t read the specials chalked in Chinese on the wall, the manager will translate and suggest dishes, and they won’t all be the standard fare.

Of course, you can get a whole steamed fish with ginger, scallions and soy sauce. He’ll lead you back to the fish tanks to point out the various types of fish you could order that night. A series of cascading tanks up front hold live prawns and crabs.

To start, there’s an excellent winter melon soup or a delicate mixed seafood and tofu soup. Live prawns are simply steamed and served with a dipping sauce fired with red chile. Fat, crunchy strands of jellyfish are dressed in sesame oil and scattered with sesame seeds. The dish I liked best was the cold simmered chicken with scallions. It looks like plain boiled chicken--until you taste the succulent, moist flesh. Ordered as takeout, it would make brilliant picnic or Hollywood Bowl fare.

Delicious, too, are the snowy sliced scallops stir-fried with sweet and crunchy lily buds. The special house crab is a large Dungeness coated in a batter and fried in the shell, and then sauced with black beans, red chiles and lots of garlic. It’s a little greasy, but fun to eat once you get into it. Dessert is a chilled coffee custard stiff with gelatin that tastes like a soothing cafe au lait.

As we get ready to leave, the young assistant manager hands us a photocopied sheet with something written in Chinese, with English translation. It’s directions on where to park. I guess he figures we’ll be back.

BE THERE

Jade Ocean, 25 W. Valley Blvd. (at Garfield Avenue), Alhambra; (626) 281-1818. Open daily for lunch and dinner (until 1 a.m.). Lot parking. Appetizers and soups $5 to $18; other dishes $8 to $28.