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CHIU CHOW BOY

3261 Kennedy Rd., Toronto. 416-335-0336. No credit cards. Dinner for two with beer, tax and tip, $50.

I haven't eaten Chinese food for three months, so I came to it (almost) a virgin, so to speak, and was rendered nearly wordless with ecstasy by the snap and crackle of delectables at Chiu Chow Boy. Some may accuse me of being an easy mark, but knowing good taste from bad is a skill like riding a bicycle. Sure, I ate camp food all summer, but I know it for what it is.

Chiu Chow (or Chaozhou) cuisine is from the easternmost part of Guangdong province in the region of the city of Swatow. Chiu Chow cooks favour duck, goose and other poultry, which they enhance with garlic and vinegar dipping sauce. Their touch is characterized by stronger, earthier tastes than their Cantonese colleagues to the west and they use less oil than other Chinese regions. Which, to me, is heaven on a plate.

I have grown weary of the hot, oily excesses of Szechuan, but am often unmoved by the delicacy and quietness of Cantonese cooking. Into the breach - Chiu Chow cuisine, more robust than Cantonese and more delicate than Szechuan.

Chiu Chow Boy, the restaurant, may not be the ideal landing spot for less-than-intrepid Caucasian diners. There are two menus, one in Chinese and one in English. When we ask if there's anything yummy on the Chinese menu that's not on the English one, they say no, but we have a language barrier the size of my appetite. None of the servers we encounter on two visits have significant command of English, so if you don't speak Chinese, you're on your own with the menu. Good luck.

Order the weird stuff. Okay, not the really weird stuff. We did not manage to brave blood jelly soup or stir-fried pig's intestine, but we tried eggplant with olives and minced pork in hot pot, fried turnip in XO sauce and pan-fried oyster patties Chiu Chow style. We also had marinated duck, spicy fried noodles and sweet-and-sour chopped ribs Chiu Chow style.

Since when do Chinese people eat olives? They were not in evidence in the eggplant hot pot, but our server (only when pressed) pointed out tiny dark green shreds with no particular discernible flavour or scent. Clearly, though, these babies have offered up something, for the hot pot's flavours are deep and strong, much more complex than the usual hot-pot benediction. The pan-fried oyster patties turn out to be a moist omelette chock full of chunks of fresh oyster, with coriander leaves for sweet contrast.

We find it strange that they bring our hot-and-sour soup after the hot pot and the omelette. But it is superb. Having given up on downtown hot-and-sour soups, which seem these days to be all hot and no sour, or all hot and no savour, we are bowled over by this soup's delicacy and fine balance. As with the soup, the spicy noodles are like spicy noodles elsewhere - but better. Less greasy, more subtle and zinged with long al dente garlic chives and little chunks of sweet/smoky Chinese sausage.

As for fried turnip in XO sauce, first let us understand XO sauce. It was invented in the late 19th century in Hong Kong and is an intense and complicated spicy sauce made from dried scallops and shrimps with chili, aged smoked ham, garlic, onion and oil. They called it XO sauce after the high-class brandies with that upscale moniker. Now that XO sauce has been copied and rendered commonplace, sold in supermarkets in its cheap incarnation, one can never be sure of getting the real thing. But Chiu Chow Boy's XO sauce is deep and complex. By what alchemy I fail to comprehend, they have briefly flash-fried chunks of turnip with this XO sauce to produce astonishing flavour and superb texture. Turnip complex? Exciting? Yes, in these hands: soft, white, sweet on the inside and crunchy, hot, redolent of XO on the outside.

One of the region's signature dishes is duck marinated in light soy-based sauce with a hint of five-spice, and garlic and pepper vinegar for dipping. This duck is like none I've met before. Unlike the crisp fattiness of Peking duck, its skin is soft and its flesh so limpid, so soft, so sweet that one cannot stop hoovering it. Under the duck is a little pile of deep-fried tofu that has absorbed the ultralight sauce. The Chiu Chow region's love affair with poultry extends to soft, moist duck in soup with preserved lemon (whose bite brings the exotic to the broth) and to mahogany braised pigeon (whose dark breast meat is dense with flavour and intensified by a dark vinegar dipping sauce).

It is testament to the scintillating tastes and textures of Chiu Chow Boy's cooking that the restaurant is crowded seven nights a week.

It is located in an unprepossessing room, done in Formica and suburban moderne with unfortunate plastic peppers hanging beside the ducks and the crabs.

But the absence of aesthetic fades fast thanks to flavours that dance a jig on your tongue.