Chinese on the Santa Cruz

Sometime in the mid-1990s, Mark Salzman came to town, and we needed
to fill him with Chinese food.

Salzman is best known for Iron and Silk, a
memoir-turned-movie (in which he starred) about the time he spent in
China teaching English and studying martial arts. I’d fallen in with a
group charged with his care during his local appearance, and we thought
a Chinese meal would remind him of the good old days.

But this is Tucson, where Chinese restaurants abound, but quantity
has somehow edged out quality. Where could we take Salzman for a
Chinese meal that went significantly beyond adequate? Somebody made
reservations at a nice place tucked away on a side street a bit west of
Interstate 10, and the meal greatly pleased our guest—and the
rest of us.

A few years later, the owners sold the business, and the restaurant
went into a steep decline; even the booth upholstery started to look
shabby. The last meal I had there, early in this decade, was a severe
disappointment.

A couple of years ago, one of the original owners, Harry Gee,
regained control of the restaurant. Recently, two of my neighbors (one
of whom is an American of Chinese descent) urged us to give the place
another try. We did (with those neighbors joining us)—and I’m
pleased to report that the establishment is back in top form.

The name of the restaurant? Well, that’s a matter of some dispute.
The sign outside says Dragon’s View, as does the pink takeout menu.
Other menus, though, and the cash-register receipts call the place
Dragon View. The online Dex listings employ the second option. The
question: Is it the view from the perspective of a dragon, or is
it a view of a dragon?

The actual view through the front windows is of Bonita Avenue, the
street that winds along the west side of the Santa Cruz between St.
Mary’s Road and Congress Street, and windows on one side overlook the
pleasant Santa Cruz River Linear Park. It’s an inauspicious location
for a restaurant; for many years, there was hardly anything else along
Bonita, and today, the avenue is populated mainly by little office
plazas that clear out at 5 p.m. If you don’t work there, live in one of
the adjacent neighborhoods or smell the restaurant from the park, you’d
never know it exists.

That means that Dragon View is not usually crowded. Its large dining
rooms are neatly appointed in a style that’s not particularly Chinese,
and the ambient music features not sanxian and erhu, but Sonny and
Cher. The Chinese elements are all concentrated in the cuisine.

A decade ago, you had to call a day in advance to get the Peking
duck, but that no longer seems to be necessary. (We called ahead
anyway.) Duck became the centerpiece of our meal: a big platter piled
with shredded duck meat and crispy skin ($30 whole, $15.95 half),
ringed by folded-over chun bing buns, and adorned with scallions and a
sweet plum sauce. The idea is to create little sandwiches from these
elements. In China, I think, the skin is prized more highly than the
meat, but here, you get plenty of the latter. It’s tender and brown,
not at all oily or fatty—just about an ideal preparation. The
flavors of duck, onion and sauce come through boldly from within the
intentionally bland buns.

Another highlight was the walnut shrimp ($14.95) in a sauce that
manages to be delicate as well as thick, creamy and just a little
sweet. If there’s a way to turn shrimp into comfort food, this is
it.

The spicy and crispy ma po tofu ($8.95) wasn’t as spicy or crispy as
I’d anticipated, but the big chunks did have a nice contrast of
textures, soft on the inside and firm on the outside. (My neighbors
assured me that the tofu is usually crispier than this.) A bit of
minced pork added flavor to the tofu, which by its nature has little to
offer on its own.

One of the great things about a family-run Chinese restaurant is
that the staffer at your table—here, it could be Harry Gee
himself saying hello—will be happy to go back to the kitchen and
find out which of the menu’s produce selections are the best that day.
On Gee’s recommendation, we skipped the green beans we’d been
contemplating and opted for gai lan (Chinese broccoli, $9.25) and yu
choy (hefty greens, also $9.25). Both were stir-fried to a perfect,
bright-green compromise of tenderness and crunch, although, frankly, I
had trouble telling which vegetable was which. We ordered one with
garlic sauce, the other with oyster sauce (supposedly spicier, but not
to my dialed-up standards). Neither dish was overwhelmed with sauce;
the liquid mainly enhanced the greens’ natural fresh flavor.

Add white rice and good, hot (but not Chinese-style scalding)
jasmine tea, and you have more food than four people really should eat
in a single sitting. Nevertheless, perhaps because our neighbors were
regulars, the waitress offered us complimentary little bowls of
mango-tapioca soup for dessert. It was a cold and sweet milk-based
liquid with tapioca lurking at the bottom, a perfect ending to a
substantial but not over-oily meal. Apparently, the restaurant
sometimes prepares a coconut version of this.

There’s plenty more to explore on the generous but not overwhelming
menu: baked Chilean sea bass, lobster, several duck preparations and
the usual array of prawn, scallop, beef, pork, chicken, vegetable and
tofu stir-fries. Ask to see the Asian menu, which largely overlaps with
the larger American version but includes some extras, including hot
pots, mussels, clams and calamari. It’s all free of added MSG.

My neighbors tell me that—remarkably—the lunch buffet is
also very good; even decent Chinese restaurants often fail at the
buffet.

I still haven’t figured out if the restaurant’s name is supposed to
suggest the dragon’s point of view, but from my vantage point,
Dragon(‘s) View is again serving some of the best Chinese food in
Tucson.

This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2009.