Gracious Living at the Palace

San Marino has had a large Chinese influx in the last 10 years. Unlike neighboring Arcadia, San Gabriel, Alhambra and Monterey Park, though, that hasn’t generated great Chinese restaurants. The only game in town is Shanghai Palace.

This decades-old eatery fell, a few years back, into the hands of John Lieu, a dapper fellow with great respect for the dishes of his native Shanghai. Lieu replaced the coffee shop booths with beautiful wooden furniture from China and an abundance of plants. But his real change was in the kitchen. Once a place for Americanized Chinese food, Shanghai Palace has developed into a serious Shanghai restaurant. The subtle cuisine of Shanghai is known for cold dishes, dumplings and seafood, and a taste for the flavors of soy and star anise. You’ll see both Chinese and non-Chinese enjoying the same dishes at Shanghai Palace, which is not generally the case in San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants.

Start with a few cold dishes from the appetizer section. The dish modestly named “celery,” for instance: cold, crisp celery stalks marinated in a perfect balance of sesame oil and chile. “Vegetarian goose” is a long wrapper of bean curd skin soaked in soy sauce. It’s filled with minced bamboo and shiitake mushrooms. Virtually all the cold dishes are faultless; the duck feet are pungent and fiery, the cold beef aromatic with star anise. Some might object to the wine-marinated chicken, which is slightly undercooked for Western tastes.

Now try some selections from the “wonton and pastry” corner of the menu. The steamed dumplings are that glory of Shanghai tea rooms, shiao lung bao: “little dragon dumplings.” The steamer dish is filled with eight perfect dumplings, precisely pinched at the top. Each has a soupy minced pork filling and fairly bursts with juice at a touch. “Shredded roll” is really a twisty raised bun studded with sesame seeds. The noodles in the filling (combined with shredded pork and preserved vegetables) have a good al dente bite.

Like many Chinese restaurants in the area, Shanghai Palace has a huge menu. Some of the best dishes are in the 16-item section headed “house specials.” The house special soup has to be ordered in advance, and you’d be missing out if you didn’t do so. It’s basically made with enormous hunks of whatever fish is fresh that day, usually tilapia or sea bass, with dried mushrooms and baby bok choy.

Another great dish from this section is “noisette pork pump,” which Lieu popularized when he ran Lakespring Restaurant in Monterey Park. The name is really pork rump, but the misspelling has taken root. It’s a luscious braised leg of pork in rich brown gravy.

My favorite from this section is stuffed hen with sticky rice. It’s an oven-roasted Cornish hen crammed with rice, minced pork, mushrooms and vegetables. When sliced through, it’s like a classic French galantine, but with the surprise of Chinese flavors. The sauteed spicy shrimp with noodles--fiery shrimp, thick noodles--is a perfect dish for spring.

There are many noteworthy dishes on this part of the menu, though a few may be challenging for those new to Shanghai cuisine. Duck tongue with fresh basil, for instance; it’s delicious, but definitely a grad school subject for the Chinese restaurant-goer. Likewise sauteed winter melon, flavored with shards of salty Chinese ham.

Some other particularly good dishes are scattered in other sections of the menu. Meat ball casserole, in the hot pot section, is fine fatty meatballs in a crock of bean thread noodles and vegetables. Under seafoods, you’ll find the spicy clam with bay leaf: a pile of fried clams dominated by the flavor of sweet basil. Eight treasure steamed rice, the quintessential Chinese dessert, is a dome of sticky rice laced with red dates, candied fruits and chopped chestnuts.

So San Marino has become a destination city in the Chinese restaurant sweepstakes, despite having only one worthy entry.

Shanghai Palace, 932 Huntington Drive, San Marino. (626) 282-8815. Lunch and dinner, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. daily. Full bar. Street parking. All major cards. Dinner for two, $23 to $45.

What to Get: celery, steamed dumplings, house special soup (advance order only), noisette pork pump, stuffed chicken with sticky rice, spicy clam with bay leaf, eight treasure steamed rice.