Modern China Cafe has lovely setting

Eric Zhang's Modern China Cafe is a gem. Opened Christmas Day 2009, the restaurant showcases intricately decorated and lacquered antique reproductions from China, including a welcoming bureau with a webbed screen made from the shells of walnuts, a nod to the restaurant's prime location in the heart of Walnut Creek.

Compared with the San Franciscan, the threadbare restaurant it replaced, Modern China Cafe is palatial. There's a rectangular glass walled room with a table for eight. Heavy drapes can turn one end of the restaurant into a private party room for 30. The bar, with its white marble counter, bold local artwork (manager Joshua Goldstein is the chairman of the Sausalito Arts Commission) and evocative cocktails with scents of absinthe, ginger and saffron, evokes a carefree and lavish vibe.

The food can match those surroundings. The moo-shu duck ($11) is refined comfort food. Delicate sea bass ($16) comes with its flesh assertively tea-smoked a nutty brown. And the seared ahi salad ($9) brings airy greens spritzed with the light yet lively Asian dressing.

Some dishes are more straightforward and executed with authority. The Mongolian beef ($10) brings sweet, tangy and spicy into slick harmony. And the dim sum platter ($10) showcases a steaming-hot assortment of traditional favorites, including shrimp dumplings and barbecue pork buns.

I dined often and well on chef Jeff Zhou's menu at Zhang's previous restaurant, Zhang Long, on the outskirts of Walnut Creek. It closed because of a fire three years ago. But while I never encountered an off dish at Modern China Cafe, I found many ordinary, bordering on tired.

Crab cakes ($7) were deep fried and had a dense, overworked texture. The fried salt and pepper fish bites ($8) were also bland, like calamari but without an intriguing chew. The "home made Peking crispy roast duck" ($15) was flabby, making it awkward to transfer to the light pancakes. And the lamb chops ($16) were smothered in a sweet-sour-style sauce that overwhelmed the plate.

I trust Zhou's palate; my impression is that in an effort to keep prices low, quality sometimes suffers. And the overlarge menu (make sure to bring your reading glasses) is simply unwieldy. Dividing it into categories of Land, Water, Grains and Greens doesn't make the diner's formidable job any easier.

Paring down the menu might also allow Zhou to place more emphasis on sustainability, a huge challenge for the United States and China, a crucial prerequisite for a serious restaurant opening in these times.

All the parts, including smart service and an international wine list, are in place to keep this cafe humming for a long time. Still, while the lines wound out the door last Christmas, the dining room during the rainy week leading up to this year's holiday was often as quiet as a mouse.

On one particularly silent night, the downtown's power suddenly went out. "Darn, I was really getting into that song," Goldstein said, as he broke out a case of red candles.

Blind to Modern China Cafe's jazzy Asian Belle Epoque aesthetic, and trying to pluck out the dried red chiles from my Mongolian beef, I paused to take a long draw of sho chiku bai ($7 small/$14 large), a milky, roughly filtered cold sake. The modernity is here, I realized. With some tweaks, the magic would be, too.

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This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle