The Chinese restaurants of my childhood were magical places. Dimly lit studies in scarlet and black with the glint of jade and gold here and there, they were the very definition of exotic. As I fumbled with my chopsticks and watched drinks in tiki glasses and ceramic pineapples and coconuts go by, I felt like I was a million miles from the meat and potatoes world on the other side of that dragon-flanked portal.

Step through the doorway at Chen Garden on Monroe Avenue and you, too, are likely to be transported back to a time when Chinese food was more than a mere substitute for cooking at home. From the dragon-wrapped columns out front to the red lights and black woodwork within, Chen Garden evokes the era when Chinese food was as a virtual vacation, and a little dose of class came with every meal. This is intentional. When manager Sam Chen, a 30-year veteran of Chinese restaurants, opened Chen Garden seven years ago, he and his brother Scott set out to restore a sense of occasion to Chinese dining. At the same time, they wanted to bring a new emphasis to Chinese food, offering unusual and challenging dishes alongside the familiar Chinese restaurant standards.

For instance, the chefs at Chen Garden put out a very good hot and sour soup (the woman in the booth behind me at lunch one day pronounced it the best she'd ever tasted), but they also put out a stunningly good beef and coriander soup with dictyophora indusiata ($7.25). A mushroom whose name is almost as fun to say as it is to eat, dictyophora indusiata is related to the morel and used in Chinese medicinal soups to treat a variety of ailments. Such soups are rarely seen on menus outside Chinatowns, and even there they are difficult to find. Here, the soup is rich and thick with a nice white pepper bite, which enhances the savor of coriander and acts as a nice foil for the meaty and lacy texture of the transluscent mushrooms, leaving your mouth feeling energized for the next course.

Appetizers similarly run the gamut from eggrolls to cold jellyfish salad with every conceivable option in between. Chen Garden offers four different variations on spring rolls: traditional pork egg rolls ($2.60), more delicate and smaller fried spring rolls filled with vegetables or shrimp ($2.80), steamed rolls with a skin similar to a moo-shu pancake ($2.80), and a very good version of Vietnamese spring rolls filled with fresh shrimp ($3). Each is a model of its type.

In addition, the menu is full of throwbacks to a simpler time: shrimp wrapped with bacon ($6.35), shrimp toast made on squares of white bread ($6.35), a superlative and nicely crispy scallion pancake (most of the ones I've had have been greasy and limp rather than crisp and light like these were, $2.75), and paper chicken ($5.95). This last is a popular Chinese banquet dish made with chunks of chicken marinated in oyster sauce, ginger, and five-spice powder, folded into triangles of aluminum foil and then baked until the chicken is entirely infused with the marinade. Peeling open the aluminum foil packets to get at the tender and savory bits of chicken within is half of the fun.

Take a break between courses and order one of those exotic drinks full of heavy-duty booze and generous quantities of fruit juice. Aside from the glasses in which they are served, I was at a loss to differentiate most of these festive drinks, but for my money the Flaming Volcano ($9.95) delivers the most bang for your buck. A wide basin decorated to look like a Polynesian island with the cone of a miniature volcano rising up in the center, the volcano's fire comes from a shot of Bacardi 151 poured into a depression at the top of the cone and then set alight in front of you. Only one per table, please.

Entrees at Chen Garden include familiar classics, and a smattering of offerings that aren't seen on many menus in our area. All of the variations on sesame chicken - including General Tso's, Hunan, orange, and crispy chicken in Peking sauce - are in evidence, and justifiably very popular ($9.75 each). The chicken is crispy but not overbreaded, well fried, and not allowed to soak in the various sauces long enough to lose the satisfying texture of the crust when you bite into it.

For the more adventurous there are dishes like shredded pork with smoked tofu, featuring long, thin strands of meaty-textured tofu and roasted pork stir-fried with red and green pepper in a simple sauce of sesame oil and soy finished with scallions ($9.55). For those with a yen for spice there's black pepper chicken over sauteed spinach. The earthy green flavor of the spinach provides a good background for the pungent burst of black pepper and ginger in which the chicken was stir fried (lunch portion, $6.15).

Chen Garden's various clay-pot dishes bear a remarkable resemblance to Korean "casseroles." Cooked slowly in a rough-hewn clay bowl that seals in juices and intensifies subtle flavors, these are hearty meals best suited to cold weather. Beef with ginger and scallion in clay pot ($12.25) arrived boiling hot, the thick stew still bubbling and seething in its bowl. Slices of bright-tasting ginger and meltingly tender beef vied with scallions for dominance in a dish that almost invites you to dump rice directly into the pot to capture the last of the aromatic broth.

Even more unusual is the humble noodle shop fare, like noodles with spicy brown meat sauce ($7.25). Thick, pearly white rice noodles are topped with a salty and spicy "meat sauce" of chopped mushrooms, pork, scallions, and tofu loosely bound with either hoisin or oyster sauce and a generous splash of chili oil. If you like intensely spicy food, ask your waiter to make the dish "extra spicy" or flag down Sam Chen on one of his frequent passes through the dining room and ask him for some of his special hot sauce. With extra heat added, the flavors pop in your mouth and build in intensity from one bite to the next. The noodles make a good refuge from the fire. For that matter, so would a return visit to the remains of the Volcano on your table before you crack open your fortune cookie and head back, reluctantly, into the real world outside Chen Garden's dragon-guarded doors.

Chen Garden

1750 Monroe Ave

241-3070

Monday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 11:30a.m.-10:30 p.m.; Sunday noon-9:30 p.m.