Wah Kee was once the city’s Chinese seafood standard bearer; if you dared ask for the Yu-sent-me, quasi-secret menu, there were wondrous dishes, the likes of sea cucumber if memory serves, with which to terrorize unsuspecting dinner companions. There’s still a separate menu that eschews pu pu platters and luminous lemon chicken, but we’ll have to get our culinary crazies off elsewhere; the most challenging item, and it’s not seafood, is pig’s intestine with pickle vegetable. Yawn.

Salted toasted frog’s legs (the same preparation can be had with scallops, squid, and shrimp) admittedly aren’t on every other menu in town, but we expected more of them regardless. Basically, they’re nasty nuggets of neutrality, neither especially salty nor toasty, their indicated spicy component consisting of slabs of unintegrated jalapeño. We confess to preferring the Hung Sue boneless duck from the standard menu; at least the duck is tender, the usual retinue of vegetables bright. If you ignore the chewy cheese Rangoon and the tasteless eggroll, even a lunch special of Hunan shrimp mostly passes muster.

However, prices are low, service remains efficient, and the dining room, robed in shades of pale lavender and eggplant, is certainly soothing—its only active accents a pair of fish tanks sporting carp, both drab and colorful. Shall we thus be lulled into believing one of several recent fortunes (“Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it.”) ? No, this is a call as we see it: again, yawn.