Royal Touch

I ordered the sponge gourd with crab-meat paste to titillate my lunch guests. We’d just come from a lecture on exoticfigs hosted by the Culinary Historians of Southern California. If anybody would appreciate sponge gourd, I figured, it would be one of these folks. And anyway, I knew the long menu of Shanghainese specialties at King’s Palace would intrigue them.

I’m happy to report that everybody loved the sponge gourd (also known as angled luffa or silk gourd). The look of the dish--pale-green flesh splashed with neon-orange sauce (which is actually crab coral and eggs, not crab meat)--was as delightful as its mango-like texture and impossibly delicate flavor.

One of the historians ordered shrimp sauteed with chives and bay-yeh just to find out what bay-yeh was (softened crinkled tofu sheets, it turns out). The group liked it too. Their third favorite dish was Shanghai-style rice cakes. These chewy oval relatives of rice noodles came stir-fried with a tangle of Chinese leeks and bits of lean pork finished with a mild salty-sweet brown glaze.

Good Food at Reasonable Price

Brown glazes are a hallmark of Shanghai-style cooking, but we had to say the one on our fourth dish, the special chicken, was one-dimensional. Still, at $8 apiece, including iced tea or coffee and tip, the meal left us satisfied and ready to come back for more.

King’s Palace is on the second floor of a mini-mall just west of San Gabriel Square. In spite of its regal name, it isn’t one of those flashy glass-and-marble palaces with live fish tanks by the door (it does have tanks, but they’re back in the kitchen). Still, there are touches of luxury here in the linen-covered tables, white-jacketed waiters and mirrored wall.

I’d been introduced to the restaurant the week before at a dinner given by a Chinesecouple (he’s a native of Shanghai, she of Hong Kong) who seem to spend all theirmealtime hours in restaurants. A small private room, one of several off the main dining area, had been reserved for eight of us.

Drinks were poured and a few small cold appetizers of mysterious seaweeds and legumes arrived--followed by an eight-course meal. One course was honey ham layered with crisp tofu skin, served in bread like a tea sandwich. “Pork pump”--a dish made famous by Lake Spring in Monterey Park--is fresh ham braised until voluptuously soft in Shaoxing rice wine, rock sugar, soy sauce and aged vinegar, all cooked down to an intensely flavorful syrup. Our host also ordered Peking duck. It was beautiful: meaty, with glass-like shards of skin. After that came a huge caldron of duck soup.

Why Peking duck in a Shanghai restaurant? For the same reason that you’ll also see a handful of Sichuan dishes on the menu. Shanghai, as China’s commercial capital, has long attracted people from every province, and some of their specialties have found permanent places in its restaurants.

A few weeks later I returned to King’s Palace with another food-savvy Chinese couple and was glad I’d made a reservation, because the place was packed to the gills. Poring over the menus, we calmed our hunger pangs with the zhen chiang cured pork appetizer: deeply smoky ham suspended in a light aspic, a sort of Chinese version of head cheese that I would fight rush-hour traffic to eat again. The ham came with a small bowl of the famed Shanghainese red vinegar for dipping. It livened its smoky taste with a needed whack of tartness.

Our dish of huge meaty black mushrooms with chunky wedges of bamboo shoot showed off some of the vegetarian cooking so popular in Shanghai; ditto for salted vegetable with fresh fava beans. The vegetable, in this case, was more lightly salted than the usual Chinese preserved vegetables.

That Sunday may have been an off night, because a few dishes missed the mark. The Shanghai-style double-fried spareribs weren’t warm all the way through. And the Shanghainese lion’s-head meatball wrapped in ruffly cabbage leaves lacked any sparkle from its seasonings. I’m hoping these were simply momentary lapses, because as much as I’ve come to love it, one cannot live on sponge gourd with crab-meat paste alone.

BE THERE

King’s Palace, 250 W. Valley Blvd., Unit M, San Gabriel. (626) 282-9566. Wine and beer. Mall parking. Visa and MasterCard. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily; dinner 5 to 10 p.m. daily. Dinner for two, food only. $20 to $52.50. Lunch, $9 to $15.

What to Get: Honey ham with tofu skin with toast, sponge gourd with crab paste, sauteed shrimp with chives and bay-yeh, pork pump, Peking duck, black mushroom and bamboo shoots.