Tank U.

There are basically two ways to approach ordering at a Chinese seafood restaurant. (I’m assuming you don’t read Chinese--I don’t--and are unable to scope out the daily specials added to the menus.)

The first method is to go for dishes already familiar to you, the soft-baked shrimp and the clams in black bean sauce, and hope that the restaurant prepares them as nicely as Mon Kee used to do, before Mon Kee himself sold out his share to a consortium more interested in franchising than in frying squid.

The other way, more expensive but with potentially greater rewards, is to grill the waiter about what’s fresh in the tanks, check out the liveliness of the frogs and the crabs, and get one order of everything that kicks. (Remember: crustaceans have extremely primitive central nervous systems.) By the time you discuss with the waiter the seven possibilities for your newly acquired carp, you’ll have become well enough acquainted to ask for a plate of the vegetables the man over at the next table is eating, or possibly to find out about a special shipment of Shanghai hairy crab.

A couple of weeks ago, on the way to a slick Power 101-sponsored rap show in a Puente Hills disco (don’t ask), a few of us stopped by Harbor Seafood Restaurant, a cheerful glassed-in Chinese place that shares space in the San Gabriel strip mall with a Vietnamese breakfast dive, a branch of Pho 79, and a Chinese restaurant with the piquant name of Yung Ho. I’d never heard of the place, but 3-6-9, down the street, where we’d intended to go for steamed dumplings and Shanghainese sizzling eel, had closed for the night, and Harbor was full and buzzing where neighboring restaurants looked dead.

Even driving by, I could see a phalanx of fish tanks, and above them dozens of crayon specials glowing from a row of those mirrored menu boards usually seen advertising corned beef and cabbage in dimly lit bars. Harbor may not have been fancy but it was happening. And we had an almost perfect Chinese meal. First there were giant prawns, fished out of the tank one by one with a net, tossed thrashing into a bucket decorated with fluffy, wide-eyed animals. The shrimp were served a few seconds later, steamed, without the bucket, but with little dishes of a soy-chili dipping sauce. Once you’ve peeled away the shells, the flesh of the banana-size creatures was sweet and firm, far enough removed from the frozen shrimp you’re ordinarily served to be different animals all together. And they turned out to be shockingly expensive, working out to about $8 per shrimp when the bill came. A caveat about live seafood: Don’t be afraid to ask the price.

Next came live lobster, which splashed everyone at the table when it was scooped from the tank--tankside seats here can sometimes seem like a trip on the log ride at Knotts Berry Farm--and later served with a salty sauce of jellied stock. Live sea scallops didn’t splash at all, but were astoundingly good, steamed whole in their shells with a thick dusting of minced garlic, half of them bearing sacks of creamy, delicious roe, the other half--the males--slightly more tender and sweet. Crisply fried squid in spicy sauce, the only dish ordered off the menu at this meal, was almost as fine as the great version served at Yuet Lee in San Francisco’s Chinatown. There were smoky-tasting sauteed Chinese greens that none of us, including the waiter, could figure out how to translate.

But as fine as that supper was, three days later we abandoned the tank-driven approach for a meal based on the waiter’s advice, and were rewarded with goopy catsup-fried rice, pigeon McNuggets in a sweet-and-sour sauce, a sort of hot-and-sour soup, and a mushy steamed lake perch. The waiter meant well, but what he thought we wanted wasn’t really what we wanted at all.

In the next couple of visits, what we picked out of the tanks, except for fin-fish, was consistently great: the live prawns again, the live scallops, a whole, live, $45 abalone that was sliced as thinly as prosciutto, quickly sauteed with yellow chives and served in its own shell. Everything off the menu--soft-baked prawns, scallops with yellow chives, clams in black bean sauce--was just OK.

Might as well consider it the cost of tuition.

Harbor Seafood Restaurant, 545 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, (818) 282-3032. Open daily, 11:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. Beer. Parking in lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $80.