Elite Restaurant

• Cuisine(s): Asian, Chinese
  Price: $$, $$$
  Payment Types: MasterCard, Visa, American Express
• Features: Family Style, Private Party, Takeout
  Serving: Dinner, Lunch
  Alcohol: Beer/Wine
• Reservations: Accepted
  Parking: Lot Available, Street

Description

The sharpest Chinese seafood house in town at the moment is Elite, which used to be the local branch of a Chinese-owned chain called New Concept, and which still serves a few of the funkier dishes from that restaurant, including suckling pig with foie gras, fried prawns served in a bed of oatmeal flakes, and papaya salad with goose webs. It can certainly be the most expensive Chinese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley - its banquet menu includes options costing up to $2,288 for a table of 10 - but unlike its competitors, it is too intimate to land the enormous wedding-banquet bookings, which means that you can probably land a seat even around the time of Chinese New Year, and that you are unlikely to be subjected to endless rounds of bridesmaid karaoke. There are enough unsustainable choices on the seafood menu to make a Heal the Bay member weep salty, salty tears. Yet the the roast squab has skin as delicately crunchy as any Beijing duck. The Shunde-style soup of seafood with minced ham and bits of bitter melon is as tautly balanced as the exhaust note of a Lamborghini. The balls of chopped shrimp steamed in nets of shredded turnip and garnished with their own roe - the essence of the sea captured. And the morning dim sum breakfasts, ordered from menus instead of carts, are divine.