#Chef chen los angeles full#

He also uses lettuce creatively in gai soong, the minced appetizer served in a lettuce leaf. One small bowlful and you’ll remember it all week.

#Chef chen los angeles full#

This is a powerfully intense chicken broth with flaky slices of fresh rock cod, full of sesame and baby lettuce. It’s only tiny cubes of tofu in a shrimp broth with egg white and black mushroom, but the egg and mushroom have a truly velvety texture and the shrimp are as soft and sweet as a baby’s kiss.Īn off-menu soup that the chef plans to put on the menu very soon, yu pin gai tong, is nothing you’d want to call delicate. Seafood and tofu soup is one a lesser chef could never hope to reproduce. Soups are one medium in which the chef refuses to compromise, and consequently they are a highlight. The outsides are crisp, and the filling is properly dense. These aren’t the juiciest dumplings in the world, although they do have plenty of flavor. I did pause for the chef’s fried dumplings and had a mixed response. However, I didn’t taste many of the appetizers here, because they’re mostly of the egg roll and barbecue pork school. The balls are juicy, moist and almost entirely greaseless. This appetizer is simple enough, merely golden golf-ball-size portions of minced shrimp and leek, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried, but Chen’s execution is perfect. When I lived in Palo Alto, my girlfriend and I used to meet there every Friday after work.įried shrimp ball proves the point. He was the longtime chef at Chef Chu’s restaurant in Los Altos on the San Francisco Peninsula. I didn’t know it before I first came here, but I’d enjoyed this man’s food with regularity in the mid-'70s. The chef is Shiang Shun Chen, a self-confident man nearly 70 years of age, with more than 50 years’ experience in Chinese kitchens. Some of the food is new to these parts as well. In any case, everything about this restaurant’s design explores new territory for Laguna Niguel. Perhaps it’s the science fiction-style light fixtures-tiny bulbs dangling from the high ceiling at the end of jet black metal rods. Perhaps it’s the color of the walls, a pale, almost austere green with the faint iridescence you see in a soft sponge. When I say hip-looking, I really mean trendy: an uncharacteristically spare design with an overwhelming sense of vastness.

That’s sort of what is happening down at Chef Chen’s, a new, surprisingly hip-looking Chinese restaurant parked next to a Lucky in Laguna Niguel. It would be more or less like having Picasso do charcoal portraits down on Fisherman’s Wharf, or hiring Liszt to play McCartney at a piano bar. Suppose a master Chinese chef was asked to tailor his artistry to commercial tastes.