THE BEAN CURD OF DESIRE - ROYAL SEAFOOD RESTAURANT

Everybody was having lobster.

Before placing an order, Chinatown veterans look around the dining room to see what others are eating. At the Royal Seafood Restaurant on Mott Street one recent night, the vote was unanimous. Grandmothers were having lobster and small girls in crisp dresses were having lobster and eight police officers in stiff blue uniforms were having lobster. Nearly all the enormous round tables draped with carnation-pink cloths were occupied, and sitting on the center of each was a platter of red shells split open to expose the shiny white meat inside.

Lobster wasn’t anywhere on the menu, but my table followed suit and asked for one anyway. It was hacked into sections and wok-fried with a sticky, time-honored Cantonese sauce of scallions and slivers of ginger. With chopsticks and fingertips, we dug the slippery flesh out of the legs, the tail and the claws, asking ourselves how lobster could be this soft and generously sweet.

We had followed the wisdom of the crowd and won. James Surowiecki would have been proud. So would the budget hawks back at the office, because the whole lobster cost $15.

This was a week after the hurricane and a few days after the lights had come back on in downtown Manhattan. Chinatown was on my mind. I worried about the mournful fish in their dark tanks, but I also worried about the money the restaurants had lost and might keep losing if tourists stayed away. Chinatown has lived through so much that it can seem indestructible, but restaurants are fragile.

We eat in Chinatown restaurants because no part of Manhattan so readily offers better food for less money; because the portions are truly meant for sharing; because even those places that don’t change their fluorescent bulbs as often as they might still buy fresh snow pea shoots each day. Royal Seafood has glinting chandeliers, not fluorescent bulbs, but it suits all the other criteria beautifully. It has the added benefit of serving food that is often very close to Cantonese cuisine, the original flavor of Chinatown, with enough modern Hong Kong flourishes to let you know that it’s 2012.

The kitchen is under the command of Kendy Cheng, who arrived in New York from Hong Kong several years ago and founded Royal Seafood as the chef and a co-owner. His crispy fried chicken is old-school, and one night gave me almost everything you could ask from that dish, with deeply flavorful meat pressed flat beneath a crackling sheet of skin. The bird’s head stared up from the platter.

I don’t know why some of the chicken’s original savor was missing on another night. But I know I am glad I overruled the person at my table who tried to vote down the Peking-style pork chops. He got jumpy when the server called the sauce “sweet and sour.” Of course, it was the furthest thing imaginable from the phosphorescent orange jelly of dubious takeout counters. It had the color of dark rum, the resonant tang of aged vinegar and the bittersweetness of burned sugar. The sauce brought a tingle of energy to the pork’s crunchy fried coating.

Smoking-hot oil is often the elixir of happiness at Royal Seafood. It cooks a whole flounder impeccably and makes the fins, tails and bones brittle and hard to resist. It turns salt-and-pepper seafood into fritters with a slightly sweet, saffron-colored batter that reminded me, pleasantly, of the Coney Island Boardwalk. The same batter makes a nifty little snack of cubed pork ribs; you chew and suck them before spitting out the bony bits.

And the deep fryer’s transformation of tofu into an object of desire is so impressive I might almost have considered it fraud, if I hadn’t been busy helping myself to more. Fried crispy bean curd was lovely; even more appealing were cubes of tofu dressed with a rich minced-pork sauce, and olives that were vaguely sweet and more fruity than briny.

There were unengaging exceptions to the rule of deep-fried excellence, like the T-bone steak and the “house walnut shrimp.” If fried shrimp and melon cubes glazed with warm mayonnaise sounds appealing to you, though, by all means take mine. Just leave me the candied walnuts.

By Pete Wells published in "The New York Times" December, 11, 2012. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.