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SportsA fusion of tastes at China Harbor Seafood
Friday, July 18, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Yvonne Lee, owner of China Harbor Seafood Restaurant in Solomons, holds plates of Singapore rice noodles and the Triple Crown traditional Chinese meal.
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A Chinese restaurant and a seafood restaurant in Southern Maryland; these are two different worlds. And China Harbor Seafood Restaurant successfully fuses the two.
There’s the crispy whole fish, the shrimp with lobster sauce and the oysters with black bean sauce. That’s a start. There are typical Chinese food options and then some, plus a diverse array of house specialties, in which the prime ingredient could be duck or catfish or bean curd.
Even the Chinese food standards are not typically prepared. My hot and sour soup ($1.95) was loaded up with vegetables and chicken. A to-go box of roasted pork ($6.25) with garlic sauce had hearty chunks of pork. On top of all that, there are seafood and vegetable soups served for two and appetizers that range from fried crab meat wontons to steamed green mussels (12 for $6.95).
The menu is so enormous that Yvonne Lee, who opened the restaurant 17 years ago, said it might be time to trim it down.
In choosing a meal at China Harbor, one might first select shrimp, scallops, beef, chicken, roast pork, bean curd, vegetables or possibly a combination. After that, you might choose what you want it mixed with or how you would like it prepared.
In addition to chow and lo meins, fried rice, sweet and sour and hot and spicy, styles include Mongolian, moo-shu, moo-goo and egg-foo yung. Sauces include cashew nut, kung-pao, hunan, black bean, orange, garlic, curry, Szechuan-style, sesame, green pepper and lobster. Stir fries, some of which come with a low-fat white sauce, include asparagus, snow peas, string beans and broccoli. All entrées come with a choice of steamed or fried rice. Prices for a personal box range from $3 for a vegetable option to about $10. Family boxes range from $7 to about $15.
China Harbor is in Patuxent Plaza in Solomons. The front portion of the restaurant, which has a checkout counter and a nice bar, has the feel of a pick-up spot, and that’s exactly what it used to be when the main restaurant was next to the Tiki Bar.
A dining room was added to the back in 2002, when Lee moved everything to its current location. Wall-length murals in the dining room recall the restaurant’s former waterside location.
Oblivious to this dining room when I entered for lunch, I took a seat at the bar and watched the chefs go to work. I was the only customer, which seemed odd when one considers the restaurant’s general popularity and the quality of the food.
Lee, however, said the lunch traffic is generally light compared to the dinner traffic, and now that I have sampled from the menu I can see why.
While the China Harbor is certainly appropriate for lunch, the heart of the menu — that which makes the restaurant stand out — exists in the house specialties, and these dishes seems more fitting for dinner than lunch in terms of the portion size, price and general aesthetic.
Let’s say you are in my situation. If you eat one of these grand meals in the middle of the day, a couple hours later you will need a massive caffeine boost to ward off falling asleep at the keyboard.
At the top of the house specialties list is a roasted Peking duck served with 10 pancakes, scallions and plum sauce (34.95).
And while its hippy-dippy connotations might deflect your average meat-eater, I have heard one of the best dishes is the bean curd and black bean sauce ($9.95) served over Chinese spinach.
Szechuan catfish ($15.95), meanwhile, is breaded, fried and served with a ‘‘red-hot” spicy sauce. Double Delight ($22.95) eliminates a choice between meat and seafood, with jumbo shrimp, filet mignon and vegetables in a Hunan spicy brown sauce.
It is worth noting that a lot of China Harbor’s dishes are spicy. If you are sensitive to spicy food, perhaps ask the servers beforehand or at least take note of the tiny, red chili peppers on the menu which denote hot and spicy.
My own selection, however, was not spicy in the least; in fact, pina-colada shrimp ($17.95) was quite the opposite sensation.
This dish is incredible — sweet, but not too sweet. The arrangement is a mound of golden shrimp in a bread bowl over a plate of shredded lettuce and a side dish of rice you might forget about entirely as soon as you taste the shrimp.
The shrimp were breaded, slightly crispy on the outside; the inside was fresh and tender, as if untouched by heat.
The key element was the coconut sauce. There was extra in the bread bowl to dip the shrimp into, and when the shrimp were gone I dipped the bread into it and also used it to coat the rice.
In addition to my own meal, I tasted the Triple Crown ($29.95), which could easily feed several people, and the Singapore rice noodles. The Triple Crown combines three dishes on a large, colorful, artfully decorated plate.
There’s a stack of tender filet mignon cubes sauteed with a satay sauce that tastes almost like vinaigrette, chunks of chicken leg meat and shrimp with a vegetable that varies.
Singapore rice noodles, a curry-flavored dish, is rice noodles mixed with roast pork, shrimp, onions, green peppers and bean sprouts.
A marathoner’s delight, this was a mound of noodles stacked higher than almost any I have seen, and for $10.95 it seemed like a great deal.
