An Unexpected Find on Robertson

All day long, cars stream down Robertson Boulevard, but the shady sidewalks north of Pico Boulevard are quiet. The local shops have a subdued, inward-looking air. You never know what you may find.

In the case of Joyce Cafe, it’s a long, narrow dining room without any of the usual clues that this is a Chinese restaurant. Along one wall runs a banquette upholstered in a Cubist pattern: middle-period Joan Miro, perhaps. The wall opposite is elegantly spotted with tiny framed paintings and large framed mirrors.

Its Beverly Hills-adjacent neighborhood is not exactly crowded with Chinese restaurants, certainly not ones with Joyce Cafe’s specialties, dim sum and noodle soups. And fortunately for the neighborhood, Joyce Cafe delivers within a one-mile radius.

The dim sum are remarkably good, better than you have any right to expect outside a Chinese neighborhood. For instance, the translucent pasta wrapper of the har gow has a luscious, faintly chewy texture, and the shrimp inside is fresh and crisp to the bite.

Perhaps the pork and shrimp shiu mai have a slightly less thrilling wrapper, but they’re almost as good. Like the har gow, they’re steamed on thin slices of carrot to keep them from sticking to the steaming rack. Voila: a little bit of vegetable with your appetizer.

My favorite is the Shanghai juicy bun, with a not over-sweet filling and a very fluffy, flavorful bun. These three items can be ordered together as the dim sum combo. The other appetizer combo, the Joyce delight plate, is a crisp vegetable spring roll, fried won tons with an odd cream cheese and green onion filling (a little reminiscent of that Polynesian Cuisine standby, crab Rangoon) and chicken satay--very tender chicken skewers with a faint fruit flavor and a peanut sauce for dipping.

There are also northern-style rice dumplings with a variety of fillings, available boiled, steamed or fried, and crispy pot stickers closed with the traditional neat pleat-like folds. The pot stickers have a pork filling and a faintly sweet dipping sauce. I once ordered the lobster and spinach dumpling for takeout, and there might have been some mistake--the “dumplings” were long, crisp spring rolls with a shrimp and spinach filling.

That’s not the end of the dim sum lineup--there are half a dozen other choices, including a heart-healthy spring roll. There are salads too--Chinese chicken, Thai chicken, in fact mostly chicken salads, though there are a couple featuring tofu or jellyfish. The barbecued beef salad is a bit disappointing, I must say. It sounds like a Thai idea, beef skewers on salad greens, but the beef is sliced a bit thick and chewy.

A Welcome Variety of Noodle Dishes

If you want to see a lot of choices, though, check the list of noodle dishes. Each is a huge bowl filled with noodles and faintly sweet broth, topped with anything from salmon and tofu to chicken and preserved snow spinach. The only one I’ve worked through was topped with barbecued pork, mushrooms, shredded carrots and sweet, barely cooked cabbage.

After the noodles comes a list of familiar Cantonese dishes, including fried rice and lo mein (the house garlic lo mein tastes mostly of carrots and snow peas). But there are less cliched items. You can get either noodles or rice with mabo tofu, a spicy sauce mixed with ground pork and silky soft tofu.

Hoinam chicken is steamed and served on a bed of pleasant, sweetish Chinese pickle--mostly cabbage and carrot. It comes with coconut fried rice and a sort of vinaigrette loaded with green onions and fresh ginger.

Visually speaking, the most striking entree is chile pepper prawns--prawns and rings of deep red (but relatively mild) chile peppers arranged on snow-white puffed rice noodles. But that’s all there is to it; there’s no sauce, making a rather dry dish. It would work best if you were ordering several other dishes at the same time.

The most attractive item I’ve found on this part of the menu is chicken jadeite (not a Chinese word but the name of a kind of jade). It’s chicken with mushrooms, green onions, carrots and snow peas in a delicate garlic sauce, something like chicken subgum with a little garlic and a distinct note of fresh ginger.

You’d never guess such a quiet, pleasant little place lurked on South Robertson. It’s worth stopping for.

* Joyce Cafe, 1128 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 248-4818; fax, 248-2646. Lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., Monday-Friday; dinner, 5:30-10 p.m., Monday-Saturday. Beer and wine. Street parking. All major cards. Dinner for two, food only, $20-$40.

What to Get: har gow, shiu mai, juicy pork bun, chicken satay, barbecued pork noodle, chicken jadeite.