Oriental Garden

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When a bare-bones Chinatown restaurant gets regular visits from chefs like David Bouley, you know it's doing something right. The raucous main dining room teems with waiters squeezing between tables and toting plates of exceptionally fresh seafood plucked from the restaurant's fish tanks. If you have any intention of hearing your companions during dinner, reserve one of the few tables in the drab subterranean dining room. Not all dishes are worthy of the restaurant's star-chef clientele. Salt-baked fish wears heavy breading and is virtually devoid of flavor. Extracting meat from crab in its shell, bombed with ginger and scallion, requires hard work for little reward. Dim sum quality varies: Flavorful fried shrimp balls are textural marvels—crunchy on the outside, light and spongy inside—but steamed dumplings filled with shrimp and chives suffer from gummy skins. Certain seafood dishes, however, shine like few others in Chinatown. Subtle black bean sauce sets off the brininess of fresh, chewy clams. Plump oysters sizzle in a clay pot along with shitakes and scallions in a savory pool the color of swamp water. It's a color Mr. Bouley would never allow on a plate in his own restaurants, but here he surely looks the other way. — JJ Goode

Fried shrimp balls, $6.50; clams in black bean sauce, $19.95; oysters with scallions and mushrooms, $28.95

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