Leaf Peeping

Mustard Greens

by Adam Erace

Even in today's enlightened culinary age, going out for Chinese can still mean going out for Americanized Chinese. You know the stuff: gloopy sauces and gummy wontons, leaky cartons and zodiac mats. If this is now, 2010, imagine what it was like in 1992, the year that saw the opening of a real Cantonese McCoy, Mustard Greens, in Queen Village.

Nearly 20 years later, Mustard's original followers are older, grayer and, judging from a survey of the serene room one recent night, still haunting these hallowed grounds of Cantonese cooking. Sweeping renovations completed this past summer have brought a snug but stylish L-shaped bar to the front of the room and cast the walls in a cool Mentos mint-green that pours down to gleaming wood floors. Black-and-white photos snapped in France, Rwanda and Wildwood create an art-gallery air. The new look will hopefully bring in a transfusion of new blood, ensuring Mustard Greens, unlike some of its clientele, will stay off life support for another two decades.

Chef/owner Bon Siu's food is definitely good enough to bolster that cause, about as similar to Americanized Chinese as a svelte coyote is to an overfed pug. My meal was a vocabulary list of lightness. Ephemeral chicken soup for two, simmered with leaves of succulent Chinese spinach and cubes of tofu, ladled tableside into hand-painted bowls. Diaphanous dumplings, the best I've had, featuring glistening pork orbs in slips of skin, pan-fried till caramel-brown and slightly smoky. Delicate mustard greens, a restaurant signature, in a thin, clear sauce sparked with fresh ginger that complemented the natural spiciness of the wilted roughage.

If Mustard Greens had an official theme song, it would be OutKast's "So Fresh, So Clean." That even extends to entrées like tender pork in snappy "firecracker sauce" that would barely hit a 1 on the Han Dynasty spicy scale but was nonetheless lively; and fluffy fried rice mixed with crunchy snow peas and bits of curry-scented chicken. Complimentary smiles of sweet fresh honeydew sent me on way feeling more spry than when I entered. Mustard Greens is fresh to death, and you don't need a fortune cookie to figure it out.

(adam.erace@citypaper.net)

Mustard Greens | 622 S. Second St., 215-627-0833, teapotteapot.com/ttmenu.html. Open Sun.-Thu., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. Soups, appetizers, vegetables, $2.50-$8; meat dishes, $12-$15; seafood dishes, $12-$23; rice and noodle dishes, $7-$15.