Like Buk Kyung II a few blocks away, Shanghai Gate has become a hangout for foreign students. That’s due to a menu that draws on the classic cold appetizers and rich stews of Shanghai, but also to its contemporary snacks, many of which are more identified with Hong Kong or Szechuan flavors. The room also thinks outside the box on décor, with jade-green walls replacing the usual lucky red-orange. Some dishes are stronger on nostalgia than on cross-cultural appeal, but open-minded outsiders will find much novelty and enjoyment at this little restaurant just off the Harvard–Comm Ave corner.

Cold appetizers are Shanghai classics; hot appetizers run more modern. On the cold side, West Lake chicken ($4.95) is a slight spin on the better-known West Lake fish, but is well worth a try for the silky texture and intriguing flavor of these hacked pieces of chicken poached in rice wine and ginger. I also liked sweet-and-sour baby ribs ($6.95) in a style most diners will associate with red-cooked chicken wings. Most of the sauce is already cooked into the sometimes boneless pieces of pork rib, with a nice undertone of five-spice powder.

Smoked fish ($8.25) hints at smoke, but has mostly a forthright flavor of fish cooked in soy sauce. It’s presented in steak-shaped thin slices across something like a king mackerel, and provides a lot of nibbling, more like spareribs than like smoked salmon.

Among the hot appetizers, it’s hard to resist salt-and-pepper mushrooms ($5.50), a goodly heap of objects the size of ping-pong balls. There’s a mushroom at the center of each one, but they’re mostly the breading of chicken fingers, with the extra salt and pepper of Hong Kong–style salt-and-pepper calamari.

Cheese rolls ($4.95) are described as having onion and crabmeat, so you expect something like crab Rangoons. What you actually get are more like mozzarella sticks, but in six spring-roll wrappers, with a sweet-and-sour dipping sauce. What kids eat in Shanghai, apparently, is seaweed fish ($6.95). This is a big pile of fried fingers, same heavy breading, but with fish inside. Seaweed flakes in the batter make them look pale green. I liked these in the sweet-sour dip as well.

Pork dumplings ($4.95) are more or less Peking ravioli, but with proper thin skins and a fresher-tasting pork-ginger filling than most. Here the dipping sauce of choice is a red-pepper paste that also gets into several of the entrées.

For example, pan-seared chicken ($7.95) is chewy slices of breast meat with strips of celery and a few bamboo shoots, plus quite a bit of the chili paste for flavor. The same red flecks give ma po fish ($8.95) a pretty good approximation of Szechuan flavor. This is a tofu dish with added fish morsels, mushrooms, and ginger, and possibly a little of the Szechuan peppercorn, although this crucial spice is hard to find imported in good quality due to regulatory problems. (The peppercorns, which are actually the fruit of a prickly ash, host a citrus parasite, so US law requires that they be pasteurized for import. Producers in China have the equipment to do this, but standards have not been coordinated. As a result, the spice is rare in stores, and often of poor quality when you can manage to find it.)

A lot of traditional Shanghai food is soup- or stew-like, rather than stir-fried. One interesting dish of this type is the "pork in tofu wrapper" ($7.50). This comes as a number of spring-roll-like objects consisting of shredded pork in a tofu skin, presented in a creamy-looking soup with bean sprouts. The soup is better than the bland dumplings, which benefit from more of that red-pepper paste. Judging by the flavor, I think the soup is actually white from being cooked a long time with the bones.

I also like the thicker soup in a dish of "shrimp and tofu stew" ($6.25), which is that plus green peas, in a stock enriched with bacon. This is echte Shanghai, as is "Lion’s Head casserole" ($2.95). You’ll want a couple of those. Each serving is a billiard-ball-size meatball made of pork and enough soy and garlic to make it taste a little like beef, with a couple of baby bok choy and a little sauce. The baby bok choy are also the current "seasonal vegetables" (seasonal price), arranged in neat rows on a diamond-shaped platter.

"Magic shrimp" ($10.95), I suspect, are also Hong Kong–inspired. The shrimp are shelled and fried in a light, tempura-like batter, the best fried objects we had at Shanghai Gate. The dipping sauce is a pink mayonnaise. Scallion beef ($7.95) is just terrific Chinese food, slices of beef with mostly onions in a dark sauce at once salty, savory, and little sweet.

Service at Shanghai Gate is quick and accurate. I could almost have used a little more time to check out the other tables and see what to order. This kind of food works well as take-out, especially the cold appetizers and soupy or stewed dishes, which reheat well. The fried food should probably be consumed on site, or at least in the car on the drive home, since it’s at its peak the moment it comes out of the fryer.

There are no desserts, although you will get fortune cookies. (A recent New York Times story indicated how many people play the lucky numbers on fortune cookies. It seems that a recent New York Powerball lottery had 110 second-place winners instead of the usual four or five. At first, the lottery suspected fraud, but the winners had no connection to one another and all cited fortune cookies. Investigators reached a fortune-cookie factory where employees picked lucky numbers out of a hat, and had sent out a large batch with six of the seven Powerball numbers. Since this is the first reported incident of fortune-cookie numbers actually proving lucky, the story is more about how seriously diners take fortune cookies than about the occult powers of the writers of fortunes.)

The atmosphere of Shanghai Gate is set by young Asian and Asian-American students, and a few fortunate Anglo roommates or dates. (For dessert, they may go out for bubble tea.) An outsider feels the excitement of having stumbled into an authentic Chinese-food scene, but it may be more of an authentic Shanghai college hangout than a classic Shanghai grand restaurant. One can imagine a middle-aged tourist from Shanghai in a Boston dating bar puzzling over the mozzarella sticks and veggie burgers and wondering if the quesadilla is a classic Boston dish.

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