Tropical Chinese

China Palace has endured nearly 20 years on a stretch of Coast Highway where dozens, maybe hundreds, of restaurants have come and gone during the same period. Owner Jack Mau is much of the reason. Mau, one of the most charming hosts around, works a room with the best of them, and he keeps pace with his clientele’s ever-changing tastes.

Ten years ago, for instance, when Japanese food was all the rage, he opened a quality sushi bar inside his restaurant, making China Palace one of the few upscale Chinese restaurants in America to have one.

Mau and his chefs also use herbs such as basil (popular because of the proliferation of northern Italian and Thai restaurants), trendy seafoods such as soft-shell crab and Chilean sea bass and a variety of good quality boutique ingredients. All this, apparently, has kept people coming back for more.

China Palace has surprised me many times over the years. It’s a beach-side restaurant with a tropical theme, cast from the same mold as Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s. No one driving past it at night can fail to notice the trademark blue and red neon sign either. It’s an Op Art masterpiece.

Inside, the decor is, well, a tad garish. The dining room is crowded with jungle plants and cane furniture. The tablecloths are peacock blue, and the sweeping, semicircular booths next to the window on PCH are surrounded by floodlit palm trees. If Elvis had decided to design a Chinese restaurant, it might have looked like this one.

But the food is solidly conceived and consistent. And as soon as you’re seated, you get a dish of edamame, the boiled, salted green soy beans served in good Japanese restaurants.

Two appetizers you shouldn’t miss are shao mai and fried chicken dumplings, both mainstays of any Chinese teahouse. Shao mai are steamed dumplings of minced pork in thin noodle wrappers. Here, they’re crowned with fresh shrimp. The crescent-shaped chicken dumplings--six to an order--are golden brown masterpieces, moist and delicate at the same time, deliciously doused with a splash of rice vinegar.

Items from the sushi bar are available in the dining room, by the way. This is a departure from typical Japanese restaurant procedure.

I find it novel to begin a Chinese dinner with poke (a Hawaiian cross between sashimi and ceviche: yellowtail and tuna marinated in a spicy ponzu sauce), but the dish makes a light, refreshing starter. Another sushi bar delicacy to consider is tataki salad, which is seared tuna sliced thin and served with mesclun greens dressed in sesame oil and rice vinegar.

Back in the Chinese kitchen, the best soup is crab meat and asparagus. It’s a clear broth chock-full of sliced asparagus and lump Alaska king crab, redolent of its natural essence. But the hot and sour soup, I have to say, is heavily dosed with vinegar, which obscures the flavors of tree ear mushroom, dried tofu and chopped bamboo shoot.

China Palace is perhaps the only local Chinese restaurant that serves Pekin duck without advance order. Years ago, when an advance order was required here, you got a big, beautiful bird, presented whole at the table with bao zi (steamed buns) and thin pancakes and carved before you.

But it’s done differently today. The duck is carved in the kitchen. Crisped, defatted pieces of skin and duck meat are stuffed into pancakes, which also contain plum sauce and fresh scallions. When it is brought to the table, it resembles a burrito.

The dish is still delicious, but not nearly as dramatic, and at $26 I wonder whether I’d want to order it without getting the entire bird.

The main courses are eclectic, to say the least. Those marked with a chile symbol are hotter than the rest, but I’d say even the hottest dishes are tame by current standards. One of the most delicious of these dishes on the menu is chile serrano shrimp, fat shrimps sauteed in a garlicky sauce that also contains cilantro and not quite enough serrano chile to give it a mule’s kick.

Ginger duck is the poor man’s Pekin duck, a saute of duck meat, onions and lots of fresh ginger. It’s very sweet and becomes uninteresting after two or three bites. The best vegetable dish is dry saute string bean: crisp, snappy beans cooked without oil and laced with bits of pickled turnip.

There’s plenty more where those came from. The wonderful veal scaloppine is really like a Thai dish, because the thinly pounded pieces of Provimi veal are stir-fried with handfuls of sweet basil and a snoot full of black pepper.

The Maryland soft-shell crab, served with a spring salad, is gently fried and dipped in a citrus-based sauce. There’s a fine grilled fillet of Chilean sea bass, basted in a sauce I’d swear contains Japanese miso. This is also one of the best places in the county to eat fried calamari. The uncommonly tender pieces are stir-fried with spiced salt and black pepper.

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Because China Palace caters almost exclusively to a non-Asian clientele, Mau serves elaborate Western-style desserts, which his courtly team of waiters dispense from a cart. Two of the best are a frothy tiramisu cake and a white chocolate bombe filled with white chocolate and strawberry ice creams.

Yep, that cuts it. If any Chinese restaurant on the block survives another 20, this will probably be the one.

China Palace is expensive. Appetizers and soups are $3 to $9.50. Main dishes are $8.95 to $26.

BE THERE

China Palace, 2800 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach. (949) 631-8031. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. daily; dinner 5-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 5-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday. American Express, MasterCard and Visa.