On Valley Boulevard, the heart of Shanghai

Carved cherrywood chairs, white tablecloths and Chinese paintings are enough to show that Green Village doesn’t see itself as a mere village restaurant. Its menu showcases sophisticated big city food -- the dishes of Shanghai.

This style of cooking focuses on simple, natural flavors. Fresh vegetables, lightly cooked seafood and tofu are relished by the Shanghainese. Food is often stewed, emerging moist and succulent. Brown sauces that are sweet, rather than spicy, appear over and over.

Yet to the uninitiated, Green Village’s Shanghai menu items may sound off-putting. Gluten puffs and hair crab? But, in fact, the food is completely accessible. Sauteed yellow croaker with liver moss is so spectacular-looking that Chinese customers came by my table to find out what it was.

The name doesn’t give a clue. Think glorified fish sticks -- fish in a batter that contains fine strands of some sort of moss (not liver). You dip these crunchy golden morsels into salt and fragrant Sichuan pepper.

One dish that reflects the Shanghai taste for brown sauces and gentle, sweet flavors is Wu-Ti special ribs. They’re braised with lots of star anise and quite sweet. Served on a bed of spinach, the ribs are so tender you can pull off the meat easily with chopsticks.

A Chinese friend singled out hot braised fresh fish as the best dish at one meal. The tilapia (so small that the restaurant cut $2 off the menu price) was topped with a hot, slightly sweet sauce that included a hint of Chinese bean sauce. Spoon some fish and sauce over noodles and you have Shanghai’s equivalent of pasta Bolognese.

Crab meat with “squash” (actually si gua, otherwise known as luffa) emphasizes the vegetable rather than seafood. The long fingers of pale green gourd are submerged in sauce that contains orange roe but very little crab meat. Shanghai-style spring rolls are seasoned so well that they require no dipping sauce. The juicy filling is pork, shiitake mushrooms and nappa cabbage.

Anyone who dotes on crunchy sweet tidbits should happily dig into pork spareribs house-style. This is pork as candy -- glistening chunks of rib meat fried crisp, coated with dark, red-brown sweet and sour sauce and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Order leek with eel paste only if you are up to a challenge. It’s fine strands of leek mingled with slim strips that could be dark brown pasta or long skinny mushrooms but are in fact eel. Garlic, ginger, green onion and a bit of sweetness offset its fishy flavor.

Braised minced pork with gluten puffs is a lot easier to handle. The puffs are filled with pork and presented along with spinach, shiitake mushrooms and bamboo shoots in mild brown sauce. Think in terms of dumpling wrappers, and you’ll be comfortable ordering this. Gluten is a popular meat substitute in Chinese vegetarian cookery.

As for the restaurant’s braised hair crab with year cake, it uses delicate fresh blue crab in place of Shanghai’s freshwater hairy crab, a specialty prized in Asia. Although the plate seems to hold a lot of crab, there isn’t much to eat, unless you can find something with which to crack the legs. The year cakes are ordinary rice cakes, coated, like the crab, with brown sauce strongly seasoned with aromatic Chinese vinegar.

After the work involved in picking apart the crab, you can relax with a soothing hotpot that contains fluffy, gingery pork meatballs as well as rice noodles, cabbage, bamboo shoots and shiitake mushrooms. Faint, peppery heat gives a lift to the smooth, mellow brown sauce.

You might say that shredded pork with bean curd and yellow chives is well browned. The sauce and pork are brown, and so is the bean curd (baked pressed tofu), at least on the outside. You could mistake the pork strands for sliced mushrooms.

I didn’t run into one bad dish at Green Village, not even one that was mildly disappointing. The shocker was that one day, the kitchen sent out sticky, compacted short-grained Japanese rice that had been scraped out of the rice cooker. The best we could do was get a fresher container of the same rice. Just a bad rice day, I guess.

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Green Village

Location: No. 206-207 San Gabriel Square (second floor), 140 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 288-5918.

Price: Main courses, $4.95 to $12.95; vegetables, $3.95 to $5.95.

Best dishes: Wu-Ti special ribs, pork spareribs house-style, hot braised fresh fish, braised minced pork with gluten puffs, sauteed yellow croaker with liver moss.

Details: Open 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., 5 to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday; 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekends. No alcohol. Visa and MasterCard.