Friday and Saturday.Chef Chen's Chinese Restaurant | Order Online | Vacaville, CA 95688 Monday through Saturday dinner 3-9:30 p.m Sunday through Thursday, 3-10 p.m. Main dishes are $6.25 to $19.ģ0251 Golden Lantern, No. Pretty fair company for a Laguna Niguel shopping mall, I’d say.Ĭhef Chen’s is moderately priced. I’m talking about something called thousand-layer bun, a flaky multilayered rice flour pastry with an orange ginger paste inside.Įating this dessert, I envisioned Picasso’s guitar, a Liszt crescendo. The one catch is you have to call in advance for it.
If you like Chinese desserts, Chef Chen has a specialty I’d say has practically no equal. Twice-cooked pork, a Hunan favorite, is pork boiled and stir-fried with napa cabbage, black mushroom and red pepper. Dry braised whole fish, usually rock cod, comes deep-fried with a good, crunchy coating. Lover’s prawns are a plateful of prawns in two different sauces, one a light rice wine sauce, the other a chili and tomato sauce. You can console yourself, though, with some of the specials. Or in Hunan beef-from the chef’s own province, yet-but that’s what you get: stir-fried beef with fresh broccoli in sweet pepper sauce. You don’t expect sweetness, however, in a dish like shredded pork in garlic sauce, where julienned pork is cooked with Chinese vegetables in a thick brown emulsion. These are probably the best candied nuts I’ve ever had, perfectly crisp and sweet from a coating so ethereal you aren’t even sure it exists. Chen made this dish famous in Taiwan, and honestly, the nuts are fantastic, which is more than I can say for the prawns (I don’t like sweet shrimp, but my friends were wild for them). One dish where you expect it is candied pecans with prawns, where prawns are lightly sauteed in a mustard-mayonnaise sauce and topped with the nuts. But in main dishes the sweetness begins to cloy. The lettuce leaves sit atop delicate rice pancakes, and you pick them up in the pancakes and eat them burrito-style. This may be the restaurant’s best dish: tiny bits of Chinese ham and steamed chicken mixed together with bamboo, black mushroom and string bean beans amazingly removed from their pods. He also uses lettuce creatively in gai soong, the minced appetizer served in a lettuce leaf. One small bowlful and you’ll remember it all week.
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This is a powerfully intense chicken broth with flaky slices of fresh rock cod, full of sesame and baby lettuce. It’s only tiny cubes of tofu in a shrimp broth with egg white and black mushroom, but the egg and mushroom have a truly velvety texture and the shrimp are as soft and sweet as a baby’s kiss.Īn off-menu soup that the chef plans to put on the menu very soon, yu pin gai tong, is nothing you’d want to call delicate. Seafood and tofu soup is one a lesser chef could never hope to reproduce. Soups are one medium in which the chef refuses to compromise, and consequently they are a highlight. The outsides are crisp, and the filling is properly dense. These aren’t the juiciest dumplings in the world, although they do have plenty of flavor. I did pause for the chef’s fried dumplings and had a mixed response. However, I didn’t taste many of the appetizers here, because they’re mostly of the egg roll and barbecue pork school. The balls are juicy, moist and almost entirely greaseless. This appetizer is simple enough, merely golden golf-ball-size portions of minced shrimp and leek, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried, but Chen’s execution is perfect. When I lived in Palo Alto, my girlfriend and I used to meet there every Friday after work.įried shrimp ball proves the point. He was the longtime chef at Chef Chu’s restaurant in Los Altos on the San Francisco Peninsula. I didn’t know it before I first came here, but I’d enjoyed this man’s food with regularity in the mid-'70s. The chef is Shiang Shun Chen, a self-confident man nearly 70 years of age, with more than 50 years’ experience in Chinese kitchens. Some of the food is new to these parts as well. In any case, everything about this restaurant’s design explores new territory for Laguna Niguel.
Perhaps it’s the science fiction-style light fixtures-tiny bulbs dangling from the high ceiling at the end of jet black metal rods. Perhaps it’s the color of the walls, a pale, almost austere green with the faint iridescence you see in a soft sponge. When I say hip-looking, I really mean trendy: an uncharacteristically spare design with an overwhelming sense of vastness. That’s sort of what is happening down at Chef Chen’s, a new, surprisingly hip-looking Chinese restaurant parked next to a Lucky in Laguna Niguel. It would be more or less like having Picasso do charcoal portraits down on Fisherman’s Wharf, or hiring Liszt to play McCartney at a piano bar.
Suppose a master Chinese chef was asked to tailor his artistry to commercial tastes.
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