RESTAURANTS / Max Jacobson : There’s Nothing Fishy About This Chinese Eatery That Serves Sushi

Sushi in a Chinese restaurant? China Palace is a curious place--sprinkled with the East, splashed with the West and almost drowned in California.

It is one of Orange County’s most elaborate and unlikely Chinese restaurants. Set on Coast Highway in the heart of Newport Beach, the place looks more like a singles bar than a Chinese restaurant. Just look inside.

Afternoons, young professionals take meetings and slurp tropical drinks; evenings, young and restless beach dwellers dash through the bar with lime-topped bottles of Corona, coolly giving each other the eye. But look closer. Nearly all of them are in for the heaping platters of Chinese food that constantly stream out of the kitchen. This is tasty, even elegant Mandarin-style food; only purists might mind that the dishes have been slightly Westernized--call it PCH Peking.

Because of the exalted status of sushi as healthful beach food, owner Jack Mau indulges his customers. Mau says demand is high; when the sushi chef took last Saturday night off, the hardbodies were crushed.

It took two years for Mau to get around to putting up a China Palace sign; he was inspired by Boston’s wildly successful “no name” Greek seafood house, which made the gimmick nationally known. But recently Mau added a new sign--clashing red and blue neon--to advertise the sushi bar.

Adding to this eccentricity is the interior, which looks quite unlike the stereotypical Chinese restaurant. The dining room is dark and clubby; sweeping circular booths with tropic-inspired upholstery line the walls. Tropical plants hang at crazy angles from massive cedar beams, and two bubble-shaped aquariums give the restaurant an almost futuristic feel. The tank’s South American redtail catfish are not on the menu.

What are on the menu--prepared by a team of Taiwanese chefs--are primarily Northern-style dishes popular with Western palates: sizzling rice soup, sesame beef, mu-shu pork. There are also subtle touches of Canton, Szechuan and even California. Everything tastes unusually fresh; the biggest problem is choosing.

Dependable appetizers like egg roll, filled with cabbage, onion and finely minced pork, come four to an order and are served with a yin/yang red-and-yellow mixture of unctuous sweet-and-sour sauce and hot Chinese mustard. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A good soy-braised snack is paper-wrapped chicken--the chicken minced and fluffy Hunan-style, instead of right on the bone. Barbecued spare ribs are old-style Cantonese--sticky and red, but lean and flavorful. Best of all are perfectly crisped fried dumplings.

There isn’t anything truly radical on this menu--no squid, sea cucumbers, kidney or fish heads. But don’t take this as a bad sign. What you should beware of are the restaurant’s occasionally misbegotten attempts at Americana. Salmon in a seafood soup with shrimp, crab, asparagus and egg white makes the soup heavier, less Chinese and less delicious. Filet of salmon smothered in salty black bean sauce is even less appealing.

Still, standards are high, even if someone is cheating at the wok. Minced squab on lettuce (the Oriental taco of minced poultry, young bamboo, black mushroom and shredded carrot) is delightful, although our waiter admitted that the squab is really chicken. Orange-flavored chicken is a bit heavy on the cornstarch but tastes terrific.

We held our breath for a special the waiter called honey walnut shrimp. But when our other main courses arrived, the same waiter told us, “We’re out of honey.” He then proceeded to serve us a gorgeous dish called aromatic shrimp--battered, fragrant shrimp ringed by tiny pieces of broccoli. It was loaded with honey. Maybe they were out of walnuts?

The kitchen definitely has a way with vegetables. Sauteed spinach with fresh garlic is so simple you almost cannot believe it is so delicious. Eggplant with minced pork has even more garlic than the spinach, plus a handful of diced red pepper to make it sing with hotness. Dry braised string beans manage to be moist and crunchy at the same time, and there isn’t a drop of oil left on the dish when it is emptied. And Mandarin-mixed fried rice, common to every Northern-style Chinese menu, couldn’t be better. Yes, China Palace really is a Chinese restaurant. Now if we could only convince the hardbodies.

Prices are hard to label, because China Palace is its own sort of genre. Let’s call them moderate. Appetizers are $4.25 to $5.95. Soups are $4.25 to $5.75 for two, $7.50 to $9.50 for four. Main dishes are $5.75 to $26 (for Peking duck).

CHINA PALACE

2800 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach

(714) 631-8031

Open daily for lunch and dinner

All major cards accepted