Cross Section of Asian Delights at Kim Tar

When newspaper editorials talk about Los Angeles as the new melting pot, East Hollywood must be what they have in mind, an agglomeration of more nationalities than ever competed in the World Cup or signed a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

You might find a Colombian grocery, a Romanian dry cleaners, a Cambodian doughnut shop in the same mini-mall; the owner of a restaurant might be conversant in Armenian, Arabic, Spanish and Thai. You can buy a jar of beans or a soft-porn videocassette from practically any country in the world.

On the fringe of this community of strangers is Kim Tar, an expanded barbecue stand specializing in the foods of the Chiu Chow--the East’s ultimate strangers. These are the ethnic Chinese who migrated from North China to Southeast Asia dozens of generations ago, and their cuisine, at least here, seems a true hybrid: classic Cantonese-style dishes inflected with the exotic fruits and pungent fermented sauces of Thailand. Kim Tar’s menu is printed in Thai and Vietnamese in addition to the usual Chinese and English, you can choose between Chinese black tea and Thai red tea, and the tables are set with both cruets of Chinese soy and Thai fish sauces. Customers talk to each other in Cantonese, eat everything but noodles with fork and spoon rather than chopsticks, and bring in bags of the sweet Thai fruit durian from the Bangkok Market across the street. Half the dishes are studded with what look like sesame seeds but are in fact confetti of minced garlic.

The bulk of the menu is devoted to the usual stir-fries: clams with black-bean sauce, beef in sate sauce, volcano chicken. These are done as well, if not as cheaply, at any Westside Chinese restaurant. You’d do better to order steamed fish in Chinatown.

Most of the really good stuff is listed toward the beginning of the menu under the heading “Dishes.” There’s anise-scented beef stew, similar to a Cantonese beef stew spiked with an extra wallop of fish sauce, irresistible if you like the slithery texture of long-cooked tendon. Kim Tar also serves the best Chinese barbecued pork this side of Monterey Park, sweet and full of juice. Anybody would like crisp fried dumplings stuffed with fragrant sauteed leeks; tiny taro egg rolls the size of a baby’s thumb; delicious roast duck and barbecued spareribs. It’s also safe to say that Kim Tar is the place in East Hollywood to come if you’re looking for salted pig’s intestines, pig’s kidney hot pot or a party-size portion of soft, young pig, which you’re probably not.

If they could work up the guts, everybody would like the fried pig’s intestine. (We can’t vouch for the salted pig’s intestine, or the intestine with preserved vegetables, or the kishke noodles, though.) The crunchy little rounds of bias-cut entrails, deep-fried and looking something like cut figs on the plate, have something of the clean richness of slab bacon, not the musky horror you might imagine. If you didn’t know what they were, you might gobble them like pork rinds; if your spouse made you try them, you’d probably smother one small piece with chile-garlic dip and chew it up real fast.

Just as crunchy is fried hen, a small chicken chopped up before frying so that the maximum possible surface area has the chance to crisp--more crunchy bits than you’d ever thought a chicken could develop.

An extraordinary Chiu Chow-style hot-and-sour soup--closer to an intense Cantonese sweet-and-sour sauce thinned into soup than to either a Thai or Sichuan hot-and-sour--bathes chunked tomato, pineapple and either fish or shrimp, bright with cilantro and the hotness of fresh chiles. A seaweed soup, its rich, briny taste underlaid with salt and fried garlic, comes with little fish quenelles whose relative blandness is a nice contrast to the soup.

And you’ll want to try the Chiu Chow hot pot, similar to the Thai sook . Over a portable propane burner lugged to the table, a pot of broth, red with tomatoes and chiles, is brought to a quick boil. You feed the broth from plates piled with vegetables, thick rice noodles, raw beef and seafood (if you’ve ordered the combination); fish out tidbits with little wire strainers; trail slices of beef through the broth until they just whiten . . . until 15 minutes into the process you tire of the ritual and dump everything into the pot, including a raw egg that thickens the mess into something resembling tastier sukiyaki .

Kim Tar is incredibly cheap: a party of four can stuff themselves on the most expensive dishes and spend only about $30, and a set menu that includes some of the best dishes in the house feeds three for $15.

Kim Tar, 4806 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 669-1180. Open daily 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Parking in back. No alcohol. No credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $7-$15.