This space used to be Ducky Wok, an excellent Chinese-Vietnamese live-tank seafood restaurant hidden behind one of the worst restaurant names in greater Boston. Ducky Wok was one of the first Chinatown-style restaurants outside the traditional district, and Happy Allston Village Café (let's call it HAVC) continues that claim. The new place has a better name, the same live-tank seafood, and a style that’s hard to nail down. Given the emphasis on frying and a few of the specialties, I’m going to guess that someone in the kitchen is from Taiwan.
Unlike Ducky Wok, HAVC has adopted parts of the traditional Chinatown two-track-menu system. The bilingual menu is clearly superseded for some Chinese-American diners by the specials posted on colored paper hanging from the walls, only a couple of which are translated into English. I would suggest trying to get a server to expound on those signs, if necessary by pointing at the tanks and asking what they do with certain desirable items in there, such as eels, small codfish, and tautog. (The tautog habitually lean over as though they were ill, but it’s just what they do. They’re very good to eat.) But I should warn you that I had trouble getting a gloss on the difference between " Pan Fried or (Steamed) Ravioli " ($5.95), " Steamed Dumplings " ($5.95), and " Fried Dumplings " ($5.25). I did learn that whenever I asked about the last, I was told, " Taiwan-style, okay? " It is okay, since they are eight thinner-skinned pan-fried pork dumplings with open ends. The Peking ravioli ones, even when pan-fried, are thicker-skinned.
Another excellent appetizer is concealed as a chef’s special: deep-fried salted squids with stuffed shrimps, salt, and pepper ($11.95). Fortunately the squids are fresh, not salted or dried, and gorgeously fried. The salt is in the breading, and the pepper has been replaced by deadly green-chili rings. You can eat these, but don’t eat the ones with the seeds. The shrimp are stuffed with pork and fried like little packages of goodness. About the only thing this kitchen can’t fry well are chicken fingers; these must set the Guinness record for excessive breading. There’s a strip of chicken in there, but it’s buried in a catcher’s mitt's worth of padding, so the 12 fried objects look more like sweet potatoes than fingers. That padding never really gets cooked into breading, but some kids like it anyway.
These winter evenings, a big soup may be a better appetizer than fried anything. We tried the house mixed-seafood thick soup ($7.95 for four bowls; $12.95 for eight to 10). This is a solid pork-chicken stock, inflected with quite a lot of yellow blanched garlic leeks and bits of shrimp, squid, phony crab, and egg white. It’s also quite peppery. The hot-and-sour soup ($4.95 for a single bowl) isn’t very sour, but it is salty and spicy, and has excellent fillings of sliced tofu, shredded tree-ear mushrooms, and lily buds.
Deep-frying also shows well in the standard repertoire, although I don’t think this is what the restaurant is really about. Yin-Yang Shrimp ($11.50) is seven large fried shrimp in a sweet brown sauce with sesame seeds, balanced against seven large fried shrimp with a medicinal lemon-drop sauce. Excellent fried shrimp; perhaps I’ll try ordering them without the yin or the yang. Lemon chicken ($7.95) is where they got the idea for that candy-lemon sauce, and, by the way, it doesn't work well with the fried-stiff chicken scaloppine either.
But the real action is in the big dishes. Deep-fried whole flounder with soy sauce (seasonal) comes to the table with the tail (crisp and edible) sticking up, and more crust than meat. What meat there is benefits from the soy-based sauce underneath, but a lot of the fun is in eating the crisped fins. Peking duck ($23.95), served up in two courses, is one of the better versions. The crisped skin comes first, with the legs and wings for those who want a little meat in their pancake. The 10 pancakes are handled carefully to keep them soft and rollable. The drill, in case you don’t remember, is to use the scallion brushes to butter each pancake with a strip of hoisin sauce (the dark, sweet, and mentholated bean paste). Then you put in the scallion and some of the duck skin, roll it up, and munch your way to cholesterol heaven. The second course is the duck meat in a simple stir-fry, with celery, carrots, and pea pods. Here a little more sauce or seasoning would take the dish to another level.
Chinese five-spice powder, a sweet spice, does take shredded duck lo mein ($5.75) to another level. As a bonus, on our night, the lo mein was actually udon — giant square spaghetti. For major noodle needs, the chicken chow foon with satay sauce ($5.25) provides plenty of large, soft, hand-cut noodles and nuggets of boneless chicken. For a little more flavor, the braised-chicken-with-vegetables hot pot ($9.75) is mostly bony pieces of chicken in salty sauce, with a few scallions, straw mushrooms, and slices of ginger. If you really want vegetables, you probably have to order them from the " vegetable & tofu " section of the menu, although our attempt to get some baby bok choy (stir-fried seasonal vegetables, $8.95) failed to register.
This brings us to the service problem. HAVC seems attuned to the needs of multigenerational Chinese families. There are three major round tables equipped with lazy Susans, and the kitchen has no problem sending out the kind of large banquet dishes — such as our soup, flounder, and Peking duck — that go well around such tables. However, the dishes' order of arrival seemed somewhat random, and we did lose the bok choy. (In our case, the check came with the bok choy listed, but without the much more expensive flounder dish, and our waiter generously suggested we pay for the bok choy and call it a deal.) The servers are eager and positive, and take orders carefully, so I think the kitchen is somewhat willful, though obviously skilled.
The two rooms, among the nicer storefront restaurants in Allston, continue to improve, with a very fine Chinese painting of goldfish in the room with the large tables, and the always-interesting live tanks in the room with the smaller ones.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.
