A Local Treasure Only the Tourists Know

Juon Yuan is a hidden gem. I only learned of it from a friend who runs a chain of restaurants in mainland China. Like the mainland tour groups that visit its second-floor location in a San Gabriel mall, he likes Juon Yuan’s regional menu, good prices and serious attention to good eating.

Chef Henry Chang began his restaurant career in Taipei at the famous Grand Hotel. I have tasted some wonderful dishes at his restaurant--at the informed urging of my restaurateur friend. I would never have guessed that “ice fish with soybean sauce” was an extraordinary treatment of steamed sea bass, brought to the table on a burner that keeps the juices boiling. The crunchy, meaty-tasting golden crumbs on the fish are preserved soybeans.

Preserved meat in honey sauce is Virginia ham steamed with sugar and honey, sliced and arranged on a platter with sweetened lotus seeds, pineapple rings and cherries. You eat it sandwich-style, stuffed into bread slices that are slit partway through. Fat is an important part of this Hunan dish--and it is delicious--but you can simply trim it off the meat, as I did.

Other dishes entrance with their lightness. One is a soup of clams and winter melon in light chicken broth seasoned with fresh ginger. It’s a summer soup from south China.

Another soupy dish combines thin strips of preserved nappa cabbage with sliced lamb and bean threads. The cabbage, which chef Chang preserves himself, has the tangy taste of sauerkraut. Chang also ferments glutinous rice to make the rice wine that adds a delicate sweetness to sliced flounder.

A light vegetable dish combines preserved daikon leaves with fresh soybeans and mung bean noodles, seasoned only with salt and a splash of sesame oil. A variation replaces the soybeans with fine slivers of pork. Chinese squash cooked with white fungus is even milder, flavored only with chicken broth so that you can enjoy the subtle taste of the soft green squash.

I’ve only tried a couple of Chang’s tofu dishes, but they were memorable. In fried crispy bean curd with sauce, tofu is combined with ground chicken breast, shrimp and eggs, molded into dumplings, fried and served with a garlic-laced brown sauce.

A Shanghai dish called pork ball in brown sauce contains tofu too. The large, tender pork balls owe their pleasant texture to the ground tofu and water chestnuts. They are cooked in a clay pot with bamboo shoots, nappa cabbage and black mushrooms.

My restaurateur friend says Chang makes the only genuine northern Chinese hot-and-sour soup in our area (lacking only the traditional congealed blood). However, I found I had to add vinegar and pepper because it wasn’t hot and sour enough for me. For that matter, a Hunan dish of beef with black bean sauce wasn’t as fiery as I’d expected. I had thought that kind of toned-down seasoning only happens in restaurants that cater to non-Chinese diners, but Chang says Chinese customers are demanding less pepper, oil and MSG these days.

Many tables were ordering platters of long, golden rolls that looked like plump enchiladas. They turned out to be, of all things, bread made up of slim strips of dough that pull apart, like Armenian string cheese. You can get the bread steamed or deep-fried; it’s frying that produces the golden color.

The long menu includes several possibilities for appetizers. One of the nicest is Chang’s invention: five-spice beef in Chinese pancakes. The meat is sliced thin and rolled in pancakes smeared with hoisin sauce and lined with green onions. The pancakes are then fried and sliced.

Red-bean-paste stuffed pancake is a nice dessert, and not very sweet. But I would order Chang’s eight-treasure rice pudding instead. It’s a first-rate version, filled with sweetened bean paste and heavily dusted with crushed peanuts mixed with sugar. In addition to Chinese shaoxing rice wine, Juon Yuan offers a few modest California wines. But when it comes down to it, tea makes a better accompaniment to these extraordinary dishes.

BE THERE

Juon Yuan Chinese restaurant, 140 W. Valley Blvd., No. 210, San Gabriel. (626) 288-9955. Wine and beer. Mall parking. Major credit cards ($20 minimum). Open 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily. Dinner for two, food only, $15 to $30.

What to Get: Five-spice beef in Chinese pancakes, ice fish with soybean sauce, preserved meat in honey sauce, sliced fish in special rice wine sauce, fried crispy bean curd with sauce, snow cabbage with peas and bean sheet, eight-treasure rice pudding.