Scalable

By Paul Reidinger

TOWARD THE CLOSE of the last millennium, I fell into an infatuation with Barbara Tropp (who, sadly, died in the first year of the new millennium) and her China Moon Café and her China Moon Cookbook. It was an unconsummated infatuation, or perhaps I should say it was consummated, after a fashion, by my obsessive making of recipes from the cookbook. Endless velvetings of cubed chicken, et cetera. The fuss eventually exhausted the patience of my (captive) audience of one, and at some point we reverted to those doyennes of the Mediterranean, Marcella Hazan and Joyce Goldstein, so many of whose foolproof recipes are relatively simple.

We never even reached the fish-and-shellfish sections of the China Moon Cookbook, although, as Tropp puts it, "in no one area does [Chinese cuisine] excel more than in the preparation of fish and shellfish ...," due to "the traditional Chinese insistence on freshness, the technical tilt of the cuisine towards steaming and high-heat frying, and the native Chinese intrigue with all edible creatures and their parts without prejudice."

One of course admires the Chinese and their lack of prejudice, and one certainly admired Tropp and her restaurant and cookbook. But there are, truly, preparations that are best left to restaurants as Lucky Fortune, an outer Geary temple of seafood cuisine.

"Temple" perhaps overstates the case. With its steel-and-vinyl chairs, low and tatty acoustic ceiling, and severe fluorescent lighting, the restaurant bears a striking resemblance to a dining hall in some cultural center – the sort of place where (largely old) people from the old country gather to eat the old foods and speak the old tongue. As it happens, Lucky Fortune very much answers to this description. The Anglophone experiences mixed feelings in such an environment: excitement at the palpable authenticity, along with a certain amount of mystification at the specials posted in Chinese on the walls.

Fortunately the staff speak passable English, and the main menu is also in English. If we never penetrated the mystery of the wall banners, neither did we did starve, although some of the dishes on the main menu were so scantily described that they might have been virtually anything – "special assorted appetizers" ($9.50), for instance. Visions of a Chinese antipasti plate danced through our heads, and that's more or less what it turned out to be: slices of beef and of some sort of pâté, along with pickled whole baby octopus (a weirdly bright red, like tandoori chicken) arrayed around a mound of cold, fettuce-like noodles that turned out to be jellyfish. We liked the hot-and-sour soup ($3.95 for a gigantic bowl) better, mainly because it was (steamy) hot on a chilly night.

One issue with hot-and-sour soup is that it is something of a cliché – you can get it anywhere and everywhere. Not so a soup of dried scallops ($6.95) with tofu for ballast and a generous tossing of Chinese chives for color and fragrance. The dried scallops lent the broth a concentrated but subtle brininess – familiar and yet quite unlike the sweet sea quality of the fresh shellfish. The soup skeptic (who had squirmed with unease when I'd ordered the soup) was impressed.

Other marine bounty is deployed with equally satisfying effect. Pan-fried noodles with seafood ($8.50), though one of the pricier items on the menu, would nicely serve as a one-course meal for two people. Apart from being immense in scale (arriving on an oval platter big enough to hold a football), the dish was a restraint-be-damned jamboree of prawns, scallops, calamari, bok choy, carrots, and mushrooms in a fumingly gingery sauce that dripped from the underlying tangle of crisp noodles like mist in a rain forest. And squid with salted pepper ($5.95) – lightly breaded chunks scattered with chopped scallion – had been deep-fried just long enough to preserve tenderness.

For all of the menu's emphasis on creatures of the deep, there are nonseafood dishes too, and they are, in the main, just as good. Half a five-spice-scented roast duck costs just $5.95 – it was too fatty for me, though the soup skeptic couldn't get enough – while a plate of sizzling beefsteak with a voluptuous black-pepper sauce ($5.95) was strongly reminiscent of fajitas (minus the tortillas): hot cast-iron platter, julienne of bell peppers and onions, butter-soft meat.