I’ve reviewed hundreds of Chinese restaurants, maybe 100 in Chinatown proper. I still can’t tell from the outside what the specialties are going to be, but usually it becomes clearer once I’m inside. I can often suss out the English-language menu, but sometimes have to ask the waiters about the special Chinese dishes posted on the walls. Quality Café, however, is one of the most puzzling small restaurants I’ve ever reviewed. The menu says it serves "Hong Kong, Cantonese, Szechuan Cuisines," but there are 31 Chinese characters underneath that line, which would ordinarily require six to 10. Now, it is my theory that every restaurant in Chinatown has some authentic food, even the lamented Ying Ying ("English, English"), which had a legitimate chow foon with spareribs in black-bean sauce. Sometimes a restaurant has a different name in Chinese than in English (Ying Ying was an exception). And often the details below the name are quite different in the Chinese characters. I eventually had the characters translated, and the answer to the puzzle is given at the end of this column.

But there I was, trying to review an extraordinarily long menu in a seven-table restaurant. The menu had 32 subdivisions, including such novelties as "baked rice or spaghetti," "claypot rice," "toast and sandwich" (which includes PB&J and is priced à la carte, with hot or cold beverage), "special ice cream," and "afternoon tea sets." Although there are also lots of items on colored paper pasted to the wall, many are translated, and appear to be the same dishes listed on the long menu. My tactic was to invite 10 other people and set them loose. So we went all over the menu, negotiated two substitutions with our excellent waiter, and had a fine time, all without fully discovering the underlying nature of the restaurant.

On the waiter’s recommendation, we started with some examples of "Special Green Tea", which is actually that pan-Asian craze, bubble tea. Quality Café has the machine that seals the top of the cup so your giant straw gets better suction to Hoover up the black tapioca marbles. The drink part is iced green tea, tooth-achingly sweet, with strong flavors like peach (the best), litchi (not so distinctive), and green apple (too sweet).

Real appetizers favor the fried, especially the crisp and excellent scallion pancakes ($2.95) and the pan-fried Peking ravioli ($4.75) — the doughy Southern kind, preferred over the gnocchi-like steamed version ($4.75). The fried wontons ($4.95), a house specialty, are little purses of shrimp-pork filling, but absorb a little more oil than they need. The dips are varied and excellent, although my favorite was a hot-chili-oil dip with a smoky undertone that non-Asians probably have to request (we did, anyway).

Another dandy is the "yu hsiang minced chicken" ($6.75), which despite its Szechuan name is not spicy but a fun dish of fresh minced chicken and vegetables served with iceberg-lettuce leaves to roll your own canapés, with or without optional hoisin sauce. I insisted on checking out the jellyfish with sesame ($6.95) and the hot-garlic sauce with boneless duck’s foot ($9.95). The former is a big, bargain dish, nicely flavored with sesame oil and plumped up with lightly pickled cabbage slaw that some diners preferred to the gelatinous (but crunchy) jellyfish strips. The latter is another cold appetizer, the garlic sauce heated by flecks of red pepper. It can’t be easy to de-bone ducks’ webfeet, but the result is sort of like eating souse without the meaty parts.

We also tried a soup, the sliced pork with watercress ($6/small; $9/large). As expected, the small served about eight small bowls. The stock wasn’t amazing, but did pick up some herbal flavor from the cress, and there was a good amount of shaved pork.

Vegetable entrées were among our favorites. The bellwether Hong Kong "stir fried pea pod stems" ($11.95) are excellent here, jade green with lots of garlic flavor. Szechuan-style eggplant really is a bit spicy like Szechuan food, with lots of beautiful purple eggplant and a nice mix of snow peas, tree ear, and bamboo shoots that pick up the sauce well. Szechuan-style string beans with pork ($7.95) use the real Chinese long beans, if not the real Szechuan spices. We also picked the vegetables out of the "shredded pork and bamboo shoots with spicy sauce" ($8.50), although this was an all-around winner; the big slices of bamboo were especially choice.

Sweet-and-sour chicken ($7.95) is the ’50s classic, featuring heavy breading, sweet sauce with pineapple, peppers, and maraschino cherry. General Gau’s chicken ($9.25) has a more sophisticated sauce with ginger and some hot pepper, as befits a Hunan dish, plus lots of barely steamed broccoli. Sliced chicken and broccoli ($8.25) is good suburban Mandarin, a soy-sauce-flavored base with nicely cooked white-meat slices and florets of American broccoli. To get some of the sweet Chinese broccoli, we had to order triple-sausage clay-pot rice ($7.95). One sausage is the usual sweet-spiced Chinese sausage, another is a related blood sausage (I ate most of that), and the third is cubes almost entirely of fat bacon. The rice, however, is superbly aromatic. A sizzling-hot platter of chicken with black-bean sauce ($8.95) didn’t sizzle and didn’t have much of the pungent black beans that Cantonese chefs use on littleneck clams.

For serious Hong Kong food, the spicy dry-fried salted squid, scallop, and shrimp ($16.95) is a standout: the seafood is plump and delicious, there’s plenty of salt and pepper in the breading, and if you need more, the slices of green-chili pepper are all the more you need. Similarly, the hot pot of fish fillet with eggplant in special sauce ($12.95) is warming comfort food, yet familiar enough for the sweet-and-sour-chicken side of the table. Beef with curry sauce ($8.50) has the sweet, maple-y curry of Hong Kong chefs, with green peppers and lots of onions.

So, at the end of a large meal, I thought Quality Café did best with Szechuan dishes (in a rather Taiwan style) and selected Hong Kong food, and probably isn’t really Cantonese at the core. But it doesn’t list telltale Taiwan dishes, either, and the pot stickers are definitely the kind Cantonese cooks make (or buy). So I still wasn’t sure, but I do think it’s a good restaurant for large, mixed groups, despite being a small place. Service was really excellent; our waiter helped us find some good things on the menu and actually hinted at the real intentions of the restaurant (see below). Prices let you roam around and make a few mistakes.

(Solution to the Chinese characters, with a big tip of the toque to Alex Wen: the literal Chinese name of the Quality Café is "Delicious As Well As Cheap Restaurant." The non-translation of "Hong Kong, Cantonese, Szechuan Cuisines" is: "You can choose from many delicious Chinese [dishes]." The 26 characters underneath, where a menu usually enumerates the cuisines, reads approximately: "Hong Kong–style milk tea, delicious strong coffee, delicious and finely made desserts, choice rice porridge, rice and noodle plates, small dishes reasonably priced, wontons and Peking ravioli." The message to literate Chinese customers: it’s a snack parlor!)

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com .