Cox: Mei-Don is fresh Chinese cuisine

You would never know it from most American Chinese restaurants, but Chinese cuisine is among the most varied in the world.

The eight great styles of Chinese cooking include Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Szechuan and Zhejiang cuisines. Plus there are more than a dozen regional styles within China, and a handful of styles abroad, including Singaporean, Malaysian, Indian and American.

It’s those American-style Chinese restaurants that are so familiar to us. Kung pao chicken in New York is pretty much the same in Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City and at Mei-Don Chinese Cuisine in Oakmont, too, it being the latest addition to a list of about 20 Chinese restaurants in Sonoma County.

Where most of these places do vary is in the quality of the food. As at any restaurant, fresh ingredients are the key to quality on the plate. And in this regard, Mei-Don scores well. But then, Chinese cooks are renowned for insisting on the freshest vegetables. The Chinese community in northern California gets its veggies from the incomparable Bay Area foodshed.

Mei-Don is in the room that was Jacinto’s Mexican restaurant in its last incarnation. Before that, it was an excellent Polish restaurant. The current name of the place is owner Ken Wong’s mother’s name, so it’s a tribute to her.

The room’s décor is minimal, with just a few pieces of art on the walls, and the tables are bare. Four pastel scrims hang from the ceiling. But who needs luxe when just about everything on the menu is under $10, a cup of jasmine tea is free, and if you bring a bottle of wine, corkage is just $5. There’s a short wine list, nicely priced. The J. Lohr “Bay Mist” Riesling is $19 and a Leese-Fitch Pinot Noir at $23 is named for a couple of General Mariano Vallejo’s brothers-in-law, although the fruit comes mostly from Santa Barbara County and Clarksburg in the Delta. Three beers on tap each cost $4 a pint.

The dish that won the most praise at our table was Vegetable Egg Foo Young ($8.50 ??? ), an eggy pancake filled with broccoli florets, carrots, mushrooms and bean sprouts, with the batter set like a frittata, swimming in a tasty brown gravy. This is an Americanized version of a fried egg dish from Shanghai, given a Cantonese name.

Dinner actually started with a Chicken Lettuce Wrap ($7.75 ?? ½), a concept more prevalent in Southeast Asia than mainland China. Four big leaves of Iceberg lettuce sit on one plate, while a serving bowl of chopped chicken, carrots, sautéed greens and herbs sits beside it. You spoon some of this warm filling into a cold lettuce leaf, roll it up and eat it like a wrap. The filling is mild tasting, and has the virtue of being plentiful. You can give the wrap a flavor bump by spreading some black bean sauce, which comes with this dish, on the filling before rolling it up.

Sesame Beef ($7 ?? ½) needs no flavor bump. The beef strips are tender, the dark red sauce is fiery hot with spices and sesame seeds dot the surfaces. It’s a simple dish with lots of pizazz.

The menu offers six different types of chow mein - vegetable, beef, chicken, barbecued pork, shrimp and combo - plus three kinds of Singapore-style rice noodle dishes. Barbecued Pork Chow Mein ($7.75 ? ½) features the standard noodles, which are like fat spaghetti, laced with peas, green onions and carrots, but precious little pork. And the dish was greasy.

The menu promises four Pork Dumplings ($5 ?? ½) but the plate held five, so that was a pleasant surprise. The ground pork was delicately seasoned, the wontons tender. They were served nice and hot in their own little pot.

A bowl of Chicken Wonton Soup ($7.50 ?? ) was enormous, and enough to feed three people. Its mild broth was just lightly salted.

After the meal, I opened my fortune cookie to read: “Everything will now come your way.” Wow, that seemed wonderful until I realized that everything includes much that I don’t want coming my way.

To sum up: Nothing unusual to report, but the food is good.

Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review for the Sonoma Living section. He can be reached at jeffcox@sonic.net