A Taste of Hong Kong

Hoy King Seafood Restaurant may be in Chinatown, but it gives the feeling of a back street in Hong Kong. The view through the windows is much the same--storefronts splashed with Chinese characters and names like Happy Land Co., Nice Chinawares and Ta Chong Co. The illusion continues inside, as Chinese families, businessmen and women on shopping excursions crowd around the tables ordering live seafood and heaps of shiny greens. It’s the sort of place where you might see a waiter carrying a live lobster, claws waving, across the room to customers who want to examine it before committing themselves.

Non-Asians have discovered it too, drawn by the bargain combination lunches. The lunch menu offers many choices, and the combination meals provide good value. (At dinner, when the place is really packed, there is a grander menu that includes abalone, sea cucumber and shark’s fin dishes.)

Sometimes the lunch dishes are a little rough at the edges. The decorative carrots in a fish dish, for example, were for looking at, not eating, because they were made from big, tough carrots. Steamed eggplant in supreme soy sauce was unevenly cooked, so some pieces weren’t soft. Another dish was marred by tinny canned bamboo shoots.

The kung pao shrimp was scarcely hot--it came in a sweet and sour brown sauce with onions, bell peppers and just a few dried hot chiles. On the other hand, the shrimp were large, juicy and plentiful, and lunch included a tureen of soup (pork broth with a trace of meat), rice, tea and some orange wedges for dessert. Soups change from day to day. Another time the tureen might hold bok choy in a light broth or hot and sour soup.

Among the 60-plus lunch specials you can find scallop, clam, squid and oyster dishes as well as steamed and fried whole fish, all under $5. The bill shoots way up when live seafood enters the picture, though the prices are still moderate: $5.99 a pound for live lobster, crab or geoduck clam. A lobster will weigh at least 3 pounds. There’s much more shell than meat in both lobster and crab, so without other side dishes, you may be hungry in a short time, but the restaurant puts more effort into these dishes than the quick, hearty lunch dishes, so they are worth the splurge.

One of the prettiest is thinly sliced, boiled geoduck arranged on a mound of cooked lettuce and decorated with bits of fresh red chile, green onion and cilantro. A spicy soy sauce dip perks up the bland clam meat. The restaurant also serves geoduck Japanese style, as sashimi.

Deep-fried Dungeness crab is a fine, succulent dish. The crab is broken into pieces, fried and coated with a sauce that includes black beans, garlic and small red chiles. It’s messy to handle, but that’s the price you pay for eating crab in the shell.

Lobster, cut up and fried in the shell, also requires patience in digging out the meat, but who cares, when the taste is so elegant? The most popular treatment combines the lobster with green onion tops and fresh ginger.

Live shrimp are another luxury. Boiled and accented only by the deep rosy color of their shells, they show off their natural sweetness. In another presentation, the shrimp are butterflied and steamed with delicate garlic sauce.

Steamed whole rockfish with ginger and green onions is tender and light, as only very fresh fish can be. If you don’t want to pay for that caliber of fish, you can order fish filet with vegetables for a mere $4.25 on a lunch special. I got rock cod in a clear, well-seasoned sauce that added flavor to the accompanying vegetable--the bok choy relative choy sum--which contributed an intriguing bitterness in turn.

Hoy King has expanded since it opened in November. The deli adjoining the restaurant has been eliminated to enlarge the dining room and provide additional space for large groups. More room for us diners, but alas, the plump, glistening soy sauce chicken legs that looked so tempting there are now only a memory.

Hoy King Seafood Restaurant, 207 Ord St., L.A. (213) 680-1705. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. Major credit cards. Lunch specials, $4.25 and $4.90; dinner for two, $21 to $56.

What to Get: Boiled geoduck clam, deep-fried crab or lobster, boiled live shrimp, steamed live shrimp with garlic sauce, seafood lunch specials such as fish filet with bean sprouts, vegetables or black bean sauce.