A Chinese Newcomer Where Fish Is Prepared Tableside

The restaurant that opened in August has an outdoor courtyard in front dotted with potted plants. The interior holds about 80, where lights hang from the high ceiling like crumpled constellations, and a dangling chain-link curtain circumnavigates the room. Booths clad in dark woods offer the most comfortable seating while tables jumble in the center. On my first visit, a teenage pianist played Beethoven’s sonatas on a grand piano in the center of the room; on my next visit she, and it, had vanished.

The restaurant’s foremost specialty is whole fish – pick sea bass or croaker – that can be done five different ways. The fish weighs a pound-and-a-half or slightly more, and can easily feed three or four. Of the two I tried, a “whole fish in foil” ($42) was the most astonishing. A raw fish is wrapped up like a birthday present in parchment, similar to the French “en papillote,” and ferried to the table on a brazier.

With a flourish, the waiter lights the flame, then puts it out a few minutes later. The package is ceremoniously unwrapped, Et voila! The fish emerges fully cooked and steaming in a chunky sea of bright red, layered with pickled red chiles. More conventional is the province’s most famous fish dish: braised fish in Sichuan bean sauce, with multiple types of chiles, Sichuan peppercorns tossed with a restrained hand, and an intense fermented bean sauce that melds with the multitude of flavors. I never got to the dish called whole fish in tofu pudding, but it too features a whole fish in freshly made tofu and comes in a bowl laked with chile oil.

The menu is vast, and on three visits – once with a group of eight – I could only try a fifth of it. For that visit, the pig ear appetizer ($12) was as soft as a glove, providing a slippery chew, but no crunch. In another dish, a pig kidney had been carved into flowers something like snapdragons with a mild minerally flavor. Tendon also makes an appearance in several dishes, including the beef tendon with peppers ($28); instead of being thin-sliced, it comes in great wobbly chunks, flavored with both dried and mild fresh chiles.

Eggplant makes an appearance in several spots on the menu, piled up like purplish logs in eggplant with minced pepper ($10), or as a main course wok-fried with a yu xiang sauce of bean paste, chiles, ginger, and black vinegar.

Past the chiles and the heat, many dishes are mild. From the Dongbei cuisine of northeastern China comes a stir-fry of corn and pine nuts ($13) that tastes buttery. Other unexpected ingredients abound. Shredded potatoes arrive lightly sauteed with black truffle sauce in an adaptation of a Sichuan dish. A gluten salad is a cold toss of spongy beige cubes in a sweet brown dressing decorated with roasted peanuts and lily shoots. It’s one of the many dishes that point to Yuan as an exciting addition to Jersey City’s burgeoning Chinese restaurant corridor.