Hei La Moon, like its parent, China Pearl, serves dim sum daily until 3 pm, then a variety of Cantonese, Szechuan, and Chinese-American food. But unlike China Pearl, and despite being slightly outside Chinatown proper, Hei La Moon puts its Cantonese face forward. The lengthy all-Chinese take-out menu is the first I’ve seen in Boston. The bilingual take-out menu, by comparison, is a bare-bones listing of appetizers and rice plates.

This dichotomy became even clearer on my first visit, when I ordered an eight-delights hot pot with tofu ($9.95) and it had only fried triangles of tofu amid squid, shrimp, scallops, black mushrooms, scallions, a few whole cloves of garlic, and a few slices of ginger. It was served in a sand pot, and with the first cold snap of fall, was wonderfully enticing. But I’d never before had an eight-delights hot pot that lacked something weird and gelatinous — fish maw, sea cucumber, something like that. I was certain that despite my obvious focus on the Cantonese seafood menu, my Caucasian face had earned me a censored version of the authentic dish.

So I hatched a diabolical plan to have a Chinese-American friend read the Chinese menu and order take-out over the phone in Cantonese. A voice of common sense asks, "If it was your friend, why didn’t you just take the friend with you to the restaurant for another visit?" That’s almost as silly a question as, "Why, after all these years of complaining about how hard it is to get real Chinese food in Chinatown, don’t you just hire a translator to make up T-shirts or buttons or little cards that say in Chinese, ‘I know I look wrong, but I really do like authentic Cantonese food,’ and sell them to all the other Cantonese-food fiends and retire to Singapore?"

Because that wouldn’t be diabolical enough, Holmes! I wanted to see if the same hot pot ordered over the phone in Cantonese, presumably for a Chinese-American customer, was different than what was served to a non-Asian couple in the same restaurant the night before.

Anti-climax! We got the same hot pot, same price, still very good in a plastic foam container. However, some of our take-out dishes were simply not offered in English, or were different, or were priced differently.

For example, the English menu offers one of my old favorites, pork-and-mustard-green soup, starting at $5.50. On the Chinese take-out menu, the dish, in various sizes, is $7.50, $12.50, and $18, but also includes salty duck eggs. The pieces of egg are really salty, but they garnish the chicken-pork stock wonderfully, and of course the pieces of sliced pork and bright-green mustard have always offered a refreshing contrast.

We ordered fried spicy-salted shrimp ($13.95) at our sit-down meal, without specifying shell-on or -off. They came shelled, which was okay, and fresh from the frying, with the salt and a little of the pepper in the light breading, but most of the heat from jalapeño slices among the scallions scattered on top. This is a pricey dish (the calamari version is only $8.95), but a large portion of irresistible fried seafood.

Scallops and vegetables ($10.95) is another big heap of scallions, cut into half moons, with beautiful green baby bok choy (mei ching tsoi in the grocery) all around the outside, and a light, white Cantonese sauce to hold it together.

On to the take-out menu. First of all, most of the in-restaurant English menu isn’t offered to Chinese customers as take-out, either because it’s in the egg roll/fried won-ton category of Chinese-American food, or because it is Szechuan food, such as General Cheung’s chicken ($11.95). Right country, wrong region for this demographic.

Others are enhanced, like the mustard-green soup, or the Buddhist vegetarian dish with zhusheng mushrooms ($9.95; point to the second item on the second column of the second page). The English menu has a Buddha’s Delight, but I doubt that it has five kinds of mushrooms (supermarket, straw, wood-ear, oyster, and black), or lots of yellow lotus "beans," or a fascinating crunchy tofu skin, although you do see the black mushrooms, straw mushrooms, baby corn, snow peas, and water chestnuts elsewhere.

Clams with black-bean sauce are a little cheaper in Cantonese ($10/take-out; $10.95/English menu in-house). The clams are those little West Coast clams that look like cockles, nicely steamed, and done up in a sauce with more hot pepper than fermented black beans, although the beans are there.

My favorites off the Chinese take-out menu were good enough to ask about in English next time. Duck with minced taro root ($10) is a boned side of the bird packed into a taro shell and sliced into sparerib-like strips. The sweet, starchy taro is a terrific friend of the duck meat, so a clear sauce served on the side isn’t even necessary.

Chinese-style steak ($10) is large cuts, such that even Chinese diners would want a knife and fork, in a slightly sweet-and-sour sauce with a lot of onions. The white rice ($1) is some of the best in Chinatown, hot and fragrant. An old friend, Chester Yee (yo, Chester, drop me an e-mail — it’s been too long) taught me to take the rice seriously. The tea is weak but refreshing. No desserts, only fortune cookies.

Hei La Moon is quite a large room by Chinatown standards, though not as large as China Pearl. It’s done up in lots of linen, and servers bustle about in bowties, even on a quiet weeknight. The dim sum by day attracts a room-filling crowd, but the excellent Cantonese food at night is still a sleeper, with some big, round tables of Chinese-American family groups, and not many more customers than that. My suggested strategy would be to come a little later, try to see what looks good on other tables, and negotiate for "something like that." If you made it a regular stop, the waiters would remember you and start telling you what’s good in your usual categories (in a Cantonese restaurant, always make seafood one of your categories). Or they could translate more of that take-out menu. ^

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