Swell Little Pell

10 Pell Chinese Restaurant is directly across the street from Joe's Shanghai, and one of the pleasures of visiting is watching people queue up on the sidewalk outside the famous neighbor. Uncrowded and unpublicized, 10 Pell always has an available table. No reviews are posted in its front window. And it offers some marvelous food.

I heard about the place from an acquaintance who grew up in the neighborhood and is into food. It's good to know someone like this. Never would I have found the restaurant myself-even stumbling upon the place doesn't guarantee stumbling into a special meal. See, you can't just order anything at 10 Pell.

My Chinatown-bred friend dismisses Joe's as oversweet and overpriced. He told me to go to 10 Pell, ignore the menu and ask for Three Cups Chicken, which isn't on it. The waitress, who runs the place with her husband (the chef), seemed surprised, but not unpleasantly so. "Oh," she said, "you like Three Cups Chicken?"

Indeed I do. It's a sort of chicken soup, served in the same black bowl it's cooked in. The broth was deep brown, made from a base of soy sauce and Chinese wine. The meat was cut into bite-size pieces, though on the bone, and there's a lot of them. I think it's half a chicken, because I only got one foot. The other pieces weren't visibly recognizable as pieces of breast or drumstick or wing. They all had the same disguise: a savory, deep-brown glaze, and the only way to find out whether a golden nugget was mostly meat or mostly bone was to put it in my mouth.

That's a drawback, and I can't claim to have been especially pleased to discover a chicken foot in my soup, but Three Cups Chicken is beautifully balanced, undeniably delicious.

10 Pell is a neighborhood, family place. That means there are factors those of us not from a neighborhood family have to weigh against its excellent, reasonably priced Chinese food. To me there's no contest, but be warned: The place feels a bit dingy, with its grease-stained vinyl tablecloths, though it's far from unsanitary. One friend whom I took there was irritated by a faint smell of cleaning product still hanging in the air at dinnertime.

Even better than the Three Cups Chicken is the other dish my friend told me to try second: Beef with Orange Flavor. This one is on the menu, under "Hunan and Szechuan Specialties." I concur wholeheartedly with my guide: Nothing served across the street at Joe's Shanghai is on a level with 10 Pell's Orange Beef.

It arrives looking well short of spectacular. You see no oranges, just a pile of deep-batter-fried fritters, absolutely smothered in sticky brown sauce (yes, you can ascertain from a mere glance that it's sticky). The fritters, it appears, must be soggy and/or tough. Which makes all the more delightful the experience of not just crispiness, but perfect fried-batter crispiness housing morsels of tenderized steak. Orange Flavor Beef retains its shocking crispiness throughout the 20 or so minutes it takes to consume its generous entirety.

The sauce that saturates but does not soak conveys the same quiet poignancy as the Three Cups broth. This time it's orange juice and soy, fresh scallions and dried red peppers in sturdy proportion-a graceful, sweet/hot A-frame. I'd bet this is the best under-$10 dish in Chinatown.

10 Pell is not for vegetarians; the best vegetable dish I tried had meat in it. That was dried sauteed string beans, where the legumes-not particularly dry, by the way-had been tossed with minced pork so salty it brought to mind Thai curries made with anchovy sauce. Another vegetable side, broccoli with garlic sauce, had no meat, but neither was it distinguished from your everyday Chinese storefront fare.

Same for the won-ton soup. It might be on 10 Pell's menu only because any gringo wandering in would expect to see it there. Scallion pancakes, on the other hand, are better than ordinary. The pancakes themselves are carefully fried slabs of dough, tasting only subtly of scallion. They come alive with the accompanying sesame-soy dipping sauce-yet another example of extraordinary flavor masquerading in plain brown at 10 Pell.

Also worth trying is noodles with meat sauce. It's listed on the "Noodles" section of the menu, but is probably best as an appetizer. It's basically a Chinese version of spaghetti bolognese. The noodles are lo-mein mushy, the meat is pork and the sauce is light, faintly herbal and sweet. Most Chinatown cooks do a version of this dish, usually with a much less delicate touch.

If you're up for a challenge, go for the fried crabs in scallion and ginger. The meat is succulent, wonderfully spiced-and exceedingly hard to get to. They don't give you a cracker. The crabs come with their backs pulled off, bodies halved and gingery yellow sauce over everything. To get to the good stuff, you get cracking, hand-to-mouth, up to your elbows in oily sauce. 10 Pell is inexplicably stingy with napkins, and I refuse to believe I was expected to extract crabmeat from claw-shells with chopsticks.

Only the shredded pork with dried bean curd disappointed me. Even it had a pleasingly simple, if oil-heavy, sauce; the pork was tasty as ever; and the bean curd had a mushroomy earthiness that I found interesting. My issue was that the tofu also had an almost gamy sourness, especially in its aftertaste. I don't think the flavor diverted at all from the chef's intent, but it just didn't work for me.

10 Pell is inexpensive, with most items under $15. There are a couple dozen house specials on the menu (few over $10), and some might be as amazing as the Three Cups Chicken and Orange Beef. Yet I emphatically recommend against taking shots in the dark. 10 Pell is a community spot, so work your connections or proceed at your own risk. o