AsiaLIFE

Heidi Fuller-Love gets ready for the Year of the Rabbit by dining at one of the capital's most up-market Chinese restaurants.

Rumoured to be popular with Chinese garment factory owners Hua Nam serves Chinese, Thai, and seafood cuisine, and boasts an extensive range of entrees and main dishes.

Crimson cloths deck the tables and carpets, and walls are sorbet, but the red-hot deco is saved from slipping into Chinese tacky vernacular by comfortable seats, waist-high wood panelling and soothing, window-sized fish tanks dotted around the room. These give a fisheye view of the long bar and superb wine cellar stocked with a good selection of Australian reds.

Except for an arcane finger bowl of garlic slivers, whose purpose was never revealed, there were no nibbles on the table, but as the only diners we were waited on hand and foot, literally, since my flustered dining partner dropped chop sticks to the floor several times.

Black shark fin soup at US$35 is one of the restaurant’s specialties but so is the fish maw with black mushroom soup at UDS$5 so I ordered that instead. Hot and oily, the soup was fragrant with fresh coriander and chunks of black mushroom, but had very little taste of fish. Luckily, the stew pork leg in red wine sauce (US$10) saved the day.

Served with crunchy stalks of ubiquitous morning glory, the bite-sized hunks of meat were tender and the thick-as-gravy sauce’s sweet overtones were saved from being sickly by the wine’s sour backbite.

At this point the head waiter bustled out and asked if we wanted to order anything else before the chef left.

I wanted to order heavyweight Chinese delicacy baked goose webs (US$8 a pair), but my partner turned pale, so we went for the safer option of deep fried duck in honey sauce (US$15). The sauce was rich and sweet, the duck crisp and fatty. In other words it was as good as that rather dull dish ever gets.

A side dish of fried spinach in oyster sauce (US$6) was a disappointment. The spinach leaves, stuck together in shapeless wedges, were soggy and the sauce had never seen an oyster. Rice in a pineapple (US$6) (which only comes in a pineapple if you order for six or more), however, was delicious: a huge moist mound threaded with pink beads of baby shrimp and ochre wedges of that Khmer beef sausage, which looks like chorizo and tastes like gammon.

Next came the piece de resistance: fried crab basted with Kampot pepper (US$12). Straight-from-the-sea fresh, the sweet flesh of the saucer-sized crab married with the piquant pepper sauce, ending our meal on a high note.

The Verdict? The deco at Hua Nam is priceless, the service comes with a smile, the ching-ching music is pleasantly unobtrusive-and if you start your meal before 1pm you might even get to meet that illusive chef.

Hua Nam, 753 Monivong Bvd., Tel: 023 364 005.