Chow Mine!

Second-tier dishes included our spring rolls ($3), pretty gold bars stuffed with noodles and diced shrimp, piping hot, tasty but not particularly unique; salt and pepper soft shell crab, deep-fried in batter to a bumpy, warty goodness -- crisp outside and with an intense, melting flavor within -- and served with a little dish of salt (sea salt, rather than plain table salt, would have been an improvement) and a creamy garlic sauce; and clams with preserved black bean sauce ($14), earthy and exotic, a smell of old leather and salt fish. The bean sauce was superb, but the clams weren´t of best quality maybe they´d sat too long before they got to our table. As for the special house orange beef ($16), it´s quite an experience. Superthin wedges of beef are carefully washed down with water, coated with flour and crisply deep fried, and served with a sauce made from preserved tangerine peel and wedges of orange. It´s mega-sweet and floral with a taffylike texture, and if you didn´t know, you´d never guess there was real beef under all that heady citrus. One or two pieces makes a lovely counterpoint in a full meal, but if you can eat a whole plate of this stuff, you´re a bigger pig than I.

Eight little dishes -- this lineup doesn´t, of course, make a dent in the array of Ja Cheung mein noodles and mu shu chicken, the Saigon steak or the ginger duck, much less Wan´s low-carb options or the family-style bean curd. But it goes a long way in my book to polishing up China´s beleaguered reputation -- a culture that invented mu shu pork with pancakes can´t be so bad.

On a much sadder note, you´ve probably heard by now that the 28-year-old owner of Hong Kong City BBQ in Tamarac, Ray Ng, was shot dead on Mother´s Day last month during a robbery. I understand that the restaurant, a longtime favorite of ours that has taken New Times Best Of awards three years in a row -- for Best Dim Sum and Best Chinese -- has closed and won´t reopen.