When I was told that "the hidden gem of Chinese restaurants in Honolulu" was in the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center in Waikiki, I was skeptical. But the fellow who clued me in about this was raised in a Hong Kong restaurant family, works in the food business and knows his stuff. With Chinese New Year nearly upon us (Feb. 7), I consented to set aside my local-girl prejudice against driving into Waikiki (and paying for parking!) and check out Beijing Chinese Seafood Restaurant.

A few days later, I was humming the old Monkees song, "I'm a Believer" ("not a tra-ace of doubt in my mind") as I pushed away from a table littered with the remnants of a decadent lunch that began with a dish of fiery pork-stuffed pasta and culminated in a homey milk pudding so comforting and memorable that I've spent every spare moment since online and in the library among Chinese cookbooks seeking out a reliable recipe for it.

In between, there had been two great soups, a noodle dish unlike any I'd previously experienced, the best fried rice I'd ever tasted and a sweet and airy light shrimp dish.

The restaurant, a partnership between Jack Tsui of Panda Travel and Akio Higashio (who owned Naniwa-ya), and with restaurant veteran Jimmy Wong as president, is little known to locals, though popular with those who entertain international business travelers and as a meeting space for government and business officials. It's also very much on the radar of Japanese tourists; servers tend to be multilingual, able to wait tables in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese.

It's also a beautiful space of wood, stone, starched linen and gracious appointments, such as sculptures in wall sconces, etched glass and, in the front window, a mind-boggling gilded chair that's a replica of one from the Imperial Palace, surrounded by equally priceless examples of dried seafood that is among the restaurant's specialties, from a shark's fin the size of a small canoe sail to palm-size abalone.

But it's what's on the plates that counts.

A signature dish, according to Higashio, is wontons in spicy garlic and chili ($7.50), a bowl of noodled-wrapped pork in a splash of bright orange la yu chili oil flecked liberally with garlic. At dinner the second time I ordered this dish, my girlfriend — whose Chinese family owns a restaurant here and who has eaten more won ton than I've owned socks — was impressed: "This is what dreams are made of. You know, the kind of dish where you think about it and you have to go back to have it?"

This is, however, a good time to talk about the liberal use of garlic. If you don't care for "the stinking rose," you'll have a difficult time ordering at Beijing. (However, the Hong Kong-trained chefs here use a dehydrated garlic product — which I'm told you can buy in Chinatown — that lends garlicky flavor without bitter bite, and that, more importantly, doesn't burn in the heat of the wok.)

My girlfriend and I spent the time between courses talking about the art of ordering a multi-course Chinese meal. One thing never to do is to repeat flavors or key ingredients, she said. At Beijing, we found ourselves unable to avoid garlic, a significant feature in four of seven dishes we tasted.

Among the inevitable courses in a Chinese meal is soup. My favorite at Beijing was soup noodle with spicy Szechuan beef brisket ($9.75 on the lunch menu), slow-cooked slices of brisket and tendon and Shanghai cabbage in a fiery broth with chewy egg noodles. And while we're speaking of noodles, don't miss the stir-fried rice noodle with prawns and roasted garlic ($10.50 on the lunch menu), skinny sai fun tossed with shelled shrimps and lots of crunchy vegetables.

At dinner, my girlfriend and I were intrigued by the offer of individual oysters, broiled in the shell ($2.95 each) with one of two sauces, black bean or chili and garlic. These arrived on hot plates (thoughtfully presented on a cool charger) with sauce artistically drizzled about and both were as delectable to the palate as to the eye, though we agreed that the black bean sauce was awfully assertive for something as delicately flavored as an oyster. (It's the perfect dish for someone who isn't crazy about the flavor or texture of raw oysters.)

Perhaps the star of the meal was the fried scallops (in a minced sauce of green onion, red pepper and garlic, of course; $21), delicately coated with a lightly seasoned breading and flash-seared — perfect little moist pillows of sea essence.

Beijing goes in for table service, with many courses doled out from the serving plates by the waiter, and several sizzling dishes prepared tableside, including the only disappointment during our dinner, filet mignon with black pepper sauce ($22). The sauce — rich, redolent of pepper and nicely set off by the crunchy crescents of stir-fried sliced onion and slivers of scallion — was not the problem. It was the beef, which had a disconcerting over-soft texture and not a trace of sinew or grain, as though it had been artificially tenderized in some way. Neither of us knew what to make of it.

At lunch, my friends had ordered fried rice with diced chicken and garlic ($8.95). I wasn't expecting much, fried rice usually being a throwaway dish of split grains and pallid flavors. But here they use a top-quality rice that maintains its shape and al dente texture and this and the inevitable garlic took the dish to new heights. I didn't care as much for the fried rice we ordered at dinner, flavored with salty fish (harm gnee in Cantonese; $16); the potent salt-cured fish was fried with the result that it overpowered the dish.

Both lunch and dinner ended with steamed egg white and fresh cream ($5), which one of the lunch guests summed up as "a kiss from your grandmother" — warm egg white and milk custard, subtly sweet and suffused with ginger juice. It's supposed to be great for your skin; some women have a bowl every day for this reason, and there are small milk custard bars in Hong Kong that specialize in this dish, known colloquially as dun lai, "steamed milk." I'd give a kiss to anyone who sent me a recipe for it!

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.