LA Restaurants

From the hilly regions of south-central China to Los Angeles comes the Hunan Taste family restaurant. For lunch, select from 27 very reasonable combinations, including kung pao chicken ($4.95) and shrimp with broccoli ($5.95), or sample house specialities like lamb with string beans ($9.95). The delicately battered slippery shrimp in a tangy sweet-and-sour sauce ($10.95) is a highly recommended dish. Top vegetarian choices include eggplant in a zesty garlic sauce ($7.25) and tofu smothered in black mushroons ($5.95). Lunch Mon.-Fri., dinner seven nights. Full bar; takeout; catering; parking. AE, MC,V.

This branch of a venerable (read assimilated) Chinatown seafood house brings Hong Kong-style seafood to the Westside. Whole steamed rock cod wears sprigs of bright-green cilantro and exudes whiffs of ginger, green onions and soy sauce. Whole crab, broken up as usual into more or less manageable pieces, comes draped with a thick black-bean sauce. While perhaps not up to San Gabriel Valley standards, here on the Westside these dishes are impressive. On the whole, Hop Li has proved to be most adept with the least complicated preparations, those in which, in characteristic Cantonese fashion, the principal ingredient stars. Steamed chicken, for example, though it sounds banal, is actually one of the wonders of southern Chinese cooking. This is chicken at its absolute best, its texture exquisite, its full flavor enhanced by little more than its own juices. Fried items, however, have been clumsy: Delicate soft-shelled crabs are overwhelmed by thick batter, and fried squid is overpowered by its seasonings. Dinner for four, including a whole fish or a whole crab, can cost as little as $15 a person.

Bamboo walls surround those who visit Chi Dynasty, where during the summer months about 100 dishes of fresh chicken salad made with crispy rice noodles are served daily. If the salad seems too tame, then this Szechuan and Mandarin restaurant offers heartier appetites dishes like dancing prawns in spicy garlic sauce ($12.75). Also recommended is the orange-flavored beef, tender meat cooked in a spicy tangerine sauce ($11.75). Lunch and dinner seven days. Full bar; takeout; catering; valet parking; reservations suggested. AE, DC, MC, V.

You can get dim sum and then some at this large Hong Kong-style restaurant in a new Chinese mall right off the 60 freeway. Two pounds of freshly boiled shrimp (about 40)--that only minutes before were swimming in the holding tanks--come with a chile-soy dipping sauce for just $11.99. Then there's roast duck stuffed with puréed taro and presented in a crunchy, golden-brown taro-root crust--really delicious, but very rich (half duck, $10) and a short-ribs-and-eggplant hot pot ($7.95) whose not-very-tender beef serves mainly to help give the eggplant a truly wonderful flavor. Now for the excellent dim sum (not served weekend evenings): shrimp and shark fin steamed in won ton skins, sticky rice and star-anise-scented pork wrapped in banana leaves, and translucent wheat-gluten skins shielding a julienne of vegetables accompanied by a spunky red-chile paste. And best of all--worth the trip, in fact--impeccably delicate pink shrimp and bits of perfectly ripe mango sharing the inside of a crisp-fried won ton-skin roll.