Chung Shin Yuan

Button up your overcoat -- and get ready for jellyfish

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

183 California Street, Newton
(617) 964-0111
Open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for lunch,
and from 5 to 9:30 p.m. for dinner.
Open until 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
DC, MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Handicap access up a ramp from sidewalk level

During the week, Chung Shin Yuan is a quiet Szechuan-Mandarin restaurant on an out-of-the-way suburban artery. But on Saturday and Sunday mornings the place comes alive, as carloads of people -- mostly Taiwanese-American people -- line up a half-hour before opening for its remarkable Taiwanese brunch.

Sure, there may be better restaurants to recommend for a winter breakfast than a place where you have to wait outside to eat jellyfish. But if you have a good parka and an adventurous palate, this may well be the best time of year to go, since the slightly sparser crowds mean you stand a better chance of snagging a table at the all-important first seating. Then watch the dishes roll out of the kitchen with machine-gun rapidity, each one fresh and hot and probably unlike anything you've had at any other Chinese restaurant.

Taiwanese brunch is a little like dim sum in spirit: the food is mostly fried or steamed; the meats are generally seafood and pork; and everything is prepared in bite-size pieces to be shared around the table. But some of these dishes will be new even to dim sum fans.

Not everything is as exotic as jellyfish, but that's as good a place as any to start. Jellyfish salad ($6), as far as I know, is always prepared from dried fish, but you wouldn't know it judging from this version. The jellyfish itself is a translucent amber color, sliced into strips -- almost julienned -- and tossed with shredded turnip into a salad. Exotic as it sounds, the plate looks like coleslaw, and the texture of the fish is addictive, at once floppy on the chopsticks and crunchy to the bite.

Other menu items will be more familiar to fans of Chinese food: scallion pancakes ($2.75), which have a glutinous rice-flour texture inside and come with a ginger-soy dipping sauce; and Peking ravioli ($4 for six pieces), slightly doughy steamed dumplings stuffed with a pork-and-vegetable mixture. The same pork filling resides within the "small steamed buns" ($4.75), seven of which arrive clustered together inside a stainless-steel steamer, each pinched closed at the top to give the appearance of little bonbons.

Steamed glutinous rice ($2) arrives in a small banana-leaf package, shaped into a tetrahedron and tied with twine. To eat the rice, you undo the string and unroll the banana leaves to reveal a thick nugget of white rice that has acquired an earthy brown color during cooking. Break the nugget open with chopsticks and there's a little center of dried shrimp, cubed pork, and peanuts.

After the jellyfish, the strangest-sounding dish on the menu is probably pig-ear salad ($5.50). Like the jellyfish, the pig ear is shredded and no more identifiable as an ear than the jellyfish is as an invertebrate. But still, it isn't a particularly appetizing platter: the texture is cartilaginous and tough, and the flavor isn't nearly as spicy as the menu promises. Maybe pig-ear salad is an acquired taste, but a friend who grew up eating Taiwanese food says this version isn't nearly as flavorful as it could be.

One taste entirely worth acquiring here is soy milk. It's served in a large, light bowl; you can eat it with a flat-bottomed spoon or drink it straight from the dish. The milk comes either sweet ($1) or salty ($1.50); I've had only the sweet version, which has a pleasant, cereally taste, similar to the milk in a dish of Cream of Wheat. You can also use the liquid as a dip for the Chinese fried dough ($1.25) -- a foot-long pastry that resembles a massive, unsweetened cruller. The traditional Taiwanese technique for eating this bread is to use it as the filling in a kind of bread sandwich. Simply open a piece of the sesame flatbread called shao-bing ($1.50) and stuff the fried pastry inside.

Except for the soy milk, not much of the food here is as sweet as what American palates are accustomed to at breakfast, and some of it is downright spicy. Beef noodle soup ($6) contains chunks of tenderized beef and long, linguine-style noodles in a hot broth of beef and chili oil. A comforting counterweight to the spice of the broth is provided by a dish of stir-fried scalloped rice stick ($5), served with snow peas and bits of cabbage. I'm not sure exactly what rice stick looks like before scalloping, but the result is like coins of gnocchi, white and chewy and substantial, in a sweet hoisin-like sauce.

Unlike dim sum, which you choose from a selection displayed on a rolling cart, everything here is presumably cooked to order. Nonetheless, the food at the second seating seems a little oilier, as though some of it had been prepared earlier and kept warm until served. Hence the pile-up for the 11:30 opening. Service is quick and fluid; dishes arrive as soon as they're ready. Tea is a mild oolong and keeps coming to the table as often as you ask for it. The interior is spare, with typical 1980s-era Chinese-restaurant touches -- a row of smoked-glass mirrors and ceiling panels of dark, swirly enameled metal. By night, the soundtrack consists of old AM radio hits; by day, it's just the happy buzz of a roomful of diners.

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