Dumplings to Die For

“American breakfast is boring,” a Chinese friend intones as we head to Peking Restaurant in Westminster for Sunday brunch. “Eggs, bacon, hash browns,” he says, thinly disguising a sneer, “it’s always the same stuff.”

I don’t agree with him enthusiastically, since I happen to love a good plate of bacon and eggs, and especially since I allow myself the luxury only once or twice in a good month. But on this particular day, I have a special craving for a plate of hot Chinese dumplings, and in this area, I am keenly aware that Peking Restaurant is just about unbeatable.

It certainly has the right pedigree. Longtime chef James Yang passed on his accomplished kitchen to his son, Jerry Chen, and without any disrespect to the old master, I’d say the food here is better than ever. This is a simple, spotlessly clean place decorated with Chinese calligraphy, scroll paintings and several hanging wooden lanterns. Walls are paneled in ribbed wood. Tables are set with white oil cloths and the holy trinity of Chinese dumpling house sauces, soy, vinegar and chile paste.

I haven’t had better dumplings anywhere in this country, and the wide variety served here makes for a surprisingly sumptuous weekend brunch. First, you’ll probably get a metal pot filled with piping hot oolong tea--a far better bet than the insipid jasmine tea the tourist restaurants insist upon serving. Then, you’ll get a complimentary bowlful of the restaurant’s delicately flavored, subtly pungent hot and sour soup, which is laced with dried tofu, bamboo shoots, minced pork and black mushroom.

Now you’re ready for a dumpling extravaganza. If you want to start in familiar territory, order kuo tieh, Mandarin for pot stickers. You’ll get 10 crisp, golden canoes, all stuck together in a long row. The outside skins are thin, chewy and crunchy around the edges. Inside, the minced pork and chopped leek filling is so juicy it squirts when you bite in. (A similar but smaller dumplings is also available boiled, chaio tse on the menu, 15 pieces to an order.)

Green-onion pancake is a multilayered flat bread also golden and crisp on the surface, a round bread cut into wedges like a pizza. Pull on the upper edge, and layer after layer comes apart in your hand, each one flecked with chopped green onion. Then there is shrimp boiled dumpling, 15 thumb-sized dumplings with a moist minced shrimp filling, delicious and as light as air. You can’t miss.

These, it should be pointed out, are just for starters. Two of the heavyweights are roast beef with sesame cake and special shrimp egg rolls. The first is sort of a Chinese roast beef sandwich, something close to the Armenian-style aram sandwiches made by rolling lavash bread around a piquant filling. Here, the filling is aromatically spiced, meltingly tender beef brisket, fragrant with star anise.

And the bread is a wheat-based roll topped with a layer of white sesame.

The egg rolls border on the miraculous. All you get here are four egg rolls, cut in half to yield eight pieces. Each piece has a crunchy skin and a filling that is almost entirely fresh shrimp and dried bean curd, with a bit of cilantro thrown in for complexity.

Dumplings aren’t all Peking does well. Traditional Chinese cold dishes, a specialty of the original owner’s native Shandong province, are excellent. Especially good are a cold cucumber salad dressed in chile and sesame oil, and a first-rate cold chicken marinated in rice wine.

One of the house specialties available upon request is fresh deboned sole, sauteed with the muskily perfumed Chinese wood ear mushrooms. All in all, there are nearly 100 items on Peking Restaurant’s menu, and who is going to object that one of them isn’t bacon and eggs?

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Peking Restaurant, 8566 Westminster Ave., Westminster. (714) 893-3020. The restaurant is open 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Dumplings are $3.50 to $4.85.