You know it’s going to be a search exercise when a restaurant describes itself as "sushi bar, take-out, delivery, and creative catering; Hong Kong–style daily special; Northern Chinese & Taiwanese dim sum." Green Tea, which doesn’t serve green tea, is a series of restaurants wrapped inside one another. First, there is the old-fashioned Cantonese-American stuff, like spareribs, egg rolls, and egg-drop soup. Then there’s a pop-Mandarin-Szechuan menu with General Gau’s chicken and such — the mainstays of previous and dubious restaurants in this odd strip mall just off Route 9 in Newton Highlands. (The last was called Mulan — as a generality, you should avoid restaurants that share names with animated features, even those starring public-domain characters like Mulan, Pinocchio, or Pocahontas.) Then there’s an active sushi bar. Then there’s the weekend dim-sum scene, allegedly Northern and Taiwanese (which makes sense even though Taiwan is in the south, because the food incorporated the Northern specialties of the Nationalist government, which moved there in 1948). However, one of the chefs worked at the Shanghai in Chinatown, one of our waiters is from Macao, and the important food at Green Tea is the daily menu of "Hong Kong specials," including live tank seafood. Go figure.

It’s possible that some of the other menus here are good. I would predict that the Mandarin-Szechuan food is probably excellent, on the basis of some of the appetizers and "Hong Kong" specials that approximate it. But the story here is Chinatown-quality Hong Kong food at the gates of Route 128, with linen tablecloths (at night) and suburban prices. If enough such places were to succeed with a combination of Asian-American and non-Asian customers, they could herald the culinary end of 150 years of segregated Chinatowns in America.

We started with soup on a cold night. The off-menu seafood soup ($8.95 for three people) was the typical chopped-seafood soup of scallops, egg whites, shrimp, cilantro, and an especially effective use of yellow chives, the blanched Chinese garlic leeks that are often bland. Here, they popped out with a freshness that was to garlic as scallions are to onion. Bean-curd-and-vegetable soup ($4.95) put us back on the menu. This is a double or triple bowl of soup with lots of vegetables, stodgy dumplings, and an effective stock toned up with ginger and a bit of garlic.

Scallion pancake ($3.50) is the kind of thing Newton teenagers used to have with all-fried dinners, but these are very good and crisp, with a sharp scallion flavor cutting the grease. Vegetarian ravioli ($5.25) have an odd skin — thick like Peking ravioli, but dark-colored, like soba pasta. The filling is a complicated mix of chopped vegetables and ginger, some bites much livelier than others, but with a good soy-vinegar dipping sauce.

One of the best dishes from the Hong Kong menu is salt-and-pepper shrimp ($12.95), a dozen very large shrimp, skin-on, fried just right with a lot of salt and pepper, plus a few slices of green chili and scallions as a kind of sauce. I also liked golden tofu over jade ($8.95), the kind of vegetarian dish that can be dull. But here the jade is a beautiful sauté of spinach, and the tofu are large, deep-fried rectangles of a softer tofu. The softer they are, the better they taste. With a savory sauce to pour over it, this is lots of good eating, either as bites of the components, or the delightful combination.

Tender pea greens with garlic ($10.95) are one of my Chinatown favorites; these are the shoots and tendrils of sugar-snap peas, which Chinese chefs have not taken up as pods, but they sauté well to a bright green with plenty of sliced garlic in the mix. "Three cups chicken" ($13.95) is actually a hot pot, served over flame, but flavored like Indian food with basil and black-mustard seeds. The individual chunks of chicken are hacked up with the bones in, a technique that requires one to eat the dish more slowly and savor the flavors, which are more vivid with flesh on the bone. Mushrooms and baby corn fill up the dish.

I also enjoyed the short ribs ($12.95), which are actually cut like Korean kalbi, and fried like many meats in Taiwanese cuisine. This again is an exercise in prying tasty morsels off the bone. The dish is set off by a light sauce, almost like a black-bean sauce, with salt and a little sweetness, along with strips of various bell peppers and onions. The only dish I wouldn’t order again was steamed whole yellow fish (varies by size; ours was $16.95). It must have been real imported Chinese yellow fish, since it was both small and slightly fishy-tasting. I ate it all, mind you, with a nice gloppy sauce full of ginger and delectable black mushrooms. But next time I will order a bass from the live tank.

This column almost always notes the rice in Chinese restaurants, since it does vary, and it is one of the benchmarks for Chinese-American customers. However, at Green Tea we ended up on one visit with the fried rice ($5.95), which was good but not notable, and on the other with off-the-menu "New Year’s Rice Cakes" ($6.95). This sounded starchy, but was actually a stir-fry of pork, chicken, shrimp, carrots, and snow-pea pods, with oval slices of a soft noodle. This is evidently one of the coin-like shapes that assure prosperity in the New Year. (The long, stringy shapes are for long life. I’m sure Chinese-noodle lovers have a rationale for eating any possible pasta shape at New Year’s.)

Look, it could be that Green Tea has the greatest pu-pu platter since Trader Vic was a pup, but with authentic dishes like these on the menu, I’m never going to find out. My informed opinion, on the basis of techniques observed, is that this kitchen can certainly fry and make a sauce, so if the managers are determined to serve superb moo goo gai pan, they can. But I don’t think they will have to.

Service at Green Tea is very accommodating. By this I mean that once a non-Asian diner evinces the slightest interest in the real food, all kinds of un-posted dishes are made available. This was truer on a quiet evening visit than during a busy lunch, but it was true both times. The workers here want to have the kind of Chinese restaurant where they would go themselves, and they want to bring along as many discerning outsiders as they can find. This is not always the case in Chinatown, so go get ’em, Phoenix readers.

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