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[Dining Out]

Chinatown Seafood
Near-authentic fare in Brookline
BY ROBERT NADEAU

dining out
Chinatown Seafood
(617) 232-9580 and (617) 739-2577
1306 Beacon Street (Coolidge Corner), Brookline
Open Sun–Thurs, 11 a.m.–midnight, and Fri–Sat, 11 a.m.–1 a.m.
AE, Di, MC, Vi
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access to some tables

Used to be, Chinatown restaurants served “Chinese-American” tourist food. If a non-Chinese person wanted something more authentic, he or she went to suburban Mandarin-Szechuan restaurants. Later it emerged that some restaurants in Chinatown offered authentic South Chinese food, either on the Chinese-language menu or by request. This cuisine is now often described as “Hong Kong seafood,” even though it relies on Atlantic lobster, cod, gray sole, and littleneck clams. It really is Cantonese-American food, still one of the great New England cuisines. Thus, the name of Brookline’s Chinatown Seafood is a kind of great circle back to the high-quality Cantonese-American fare we “discovered” behind the menu in the mid ’70s at places like Moon Villa and Carl’s Pagoda.

The space has also circled back from a long run as a Mandarin-Szechuan restaurant, Noble House. Now it has live tanks full of tautog and lobsters, and sometimes, geoduck clams, crabs, and a codfish or two. The menu is standard suburban, with an overlay of, well, Chinatown seafood dishes.

Among the appetizers, “fried calamari with spicy salted” — that is, “spiced salt” ($8.95) — is a contemporary version of the quick-fried squid pieces with a quick sauce of chile peppers sautéed in oil poured over them. The Hong Kong–cuisine original was made with shrimp and served with a dry-dip mixture of pepper and salt, which sometimes was worked into the batter. Chinatown Seafood’s oil sauce uses crushed red pepper and sliced jalapeños for a one-star spice that timid diners can easily shake off.

Much of the rest is soup. The hot-and-sour soup ($2.95) is quite nice. It is made without starch, so the vinegar and pepper shine through, and is filled with tofu, dried lily buds, bamboo, and mushrooms for contrasting textures within a fashionable black-brown-white color scheme. Watercress-with-sliced-pork soup ($5.95/$9.95/$13.95) has a thin but honest stock flavored with slices of ginger. The slices of lean pork and hacked pieces of jade-green cress did not add much to the stock, but they are a classic combination in the spoon. We had the medium size for four and took quite a bit home.

Chinatown Seafood offers Peking duck (half $17.95/whole $26) and serves it in one rapid course. The crispy skin and tender meat were impressive, if not steaming hot, and made delightful wrap sandwiches with six pancakes and shredded scallion. Some restaurants try for the original Peking duck, with wraps of just the skin, a stir-fry of the meat, and a soup of the bones, but this one-course platter is a reasonable accommodation to American lifestyles. I have tasted fresher pancakes, however.

Back to seafood. I was most impressed with a dish that usually doesn’t get great results, “Five Delights in Nest” ($12.95). The nest is a shell of pre-fried taro root, which is often drab or a little rancid. This nest wasn’t the most delicious I’ve had, but it was lighter than most, and the delights inside were brilliantly cooked au point. This is crucial with shrimp and fresh squid, but it also brought out maximum flavor in the scallops and the paired textures of sliced chicken and pounded whelk. Those purplish pieces are reconstituted dried squid, which the Cantonese believe has more flavor than fresh, and they were entirely pleasant in this thin white sauce as well. Some straw mushrooms, scallion lengths, and a few carrots fit right in. Even the bright-green broccoli lining the taro bowl — usually undercooked — was here sweet and delectable.

Real crabmeat with pea-pod stem ($13.95) is possibly a variation on the now-common stir-fried snap-pea tendrils with garlic. The crabmeat is real, but compounded into a gooey egg sauce that some diners will not accept. I liked the combination and what it did for the like-asparagus-maybe-better flavor of pea tendrils.

Our steamed whole fish was a sea bass (seasonal, recently $13.95). I think the live-tank suppliers have made prices less an issue of seasons than of varying weight. Our fish was a meaty pound and a half, perhaps, with a clean, fresh flavor just perked up with the thin sauce of soy, shredded scallions, and ginger.

My one disappointment with Chinatown Seafood was clams in black- bean sauce ($9.95). Nothing wrong with the clams, which were plump littlenecks and well flavored. But the sauce was built on a generic dark sauce with hot pepper, but few fermented black beans. At its best, this sauce is a lively balance of salty black beans, garlic, ginger, and just enough hot pepper to match the salt.

The generic-sauce problem was also evident at lunch, where I had an otherwise very good platter of beef with Chinese broccoli on chow foon ($6.25). In most ways this restaurant has the right idea. The chow foon noodles are quickly fried, so they stay soft, don’t absorb too much oil, and get a little taste of the wok metal. (Since the luncheon specials are listed as rice plates, you’ll have to ask for the chow foon.) The Chinese broccoli is wonderfully sweet and bright green — and make sure that they’re serving Chinese broccoli, since the difference in freshness and sweetness is night-and-day. The beef is fried to an almost shocking tenderness. The only real error is that the sauce is a simple gravy.

Chinatown Seafood has a very decent wine list: 34 bottles between $20 and $65 that might actually go with Chinese food, including a fine German riesling and a New Zealand pinot gris. Also, its fortune cookies were way above average. Though they were wrapped in cellophane, they were unusually fresh, with a nice almond undertone. Service is quite good, but the restaurant has an odd policy against setting chopsticks. I don’t mind having a knife and fork for, say, large morsels of steak or clams in the shell, but it’s quite difficult to eat fat, slippery chow foon noodles with anything but chopsticks.

This is a linen-tablecloth restaurant with well-dressed waiters, and has started off with a crowd of Brookliners who have obviously spent some time in good Chinatown restaurants. I did notice some all-Chinese menus, so there will probably be some effort to market the restaurant to suburban Chinese-Americans who go into Chinatown on weekends. If you factor in the parking, the meal prices are about right, but Coolidge Corner just doesn’t have the right supermarkets yet to compete for Asian-American customers with Boston’s Chinatown.

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

Issue Date: May 10-17, 2001