Marbled goby at Gaga Seafood Restaurant

Photo: Joel Veak

You consider yourself an adventurous and avant-garde food lover — you keep current, get to the latest places, taste the newest trends. So why doesn’t your restaurant fashion sense extend to Chinatown? After all, it has the pedigree of a couture house, with Chinese ranking among the world’s oldest and most influential cuisines. Are you still hung up on the lack of beautifully appointed dining rooms, or perhaps harboring doubts about kitchen cleanliness? Then why do you suppose Chinatown is where you’re most likely to spot the city’s best chefs when they’re eating out? Could it be that our edgiest local tastemakers know something you don’t? Of course they do. Also, we couldn’t resist the idea of reviewing a place called GaGa Seafood Restaurant (25–27 Tyler Street, Boston, 617.338.8770) for the Spring Fashion issue.

Lest you get your hopes up, know that GaGa’s dining room is no stunner: it’s about as spare and plain as they come. But there are many eye-catching creatures in fabulous attire to be found here, swimming about in the live seafood tanks up front: feathery flocks of shrimp, purple-hued Dungeness crabs, mottled green Maine lobsters, barbel-chinned and wide-eyed cod, rose-tinted tilapia, and the spiny, crusty, unearthly monsters known as sea ravens. Before diving into such live-tank fare, you might start with a simple, clear seafood combination soup ($10.95–$18.95) loaded with crab, lobster, and fish. E-fu noodles ($7.50) exhibit the golden tint of egg yolks and a lovely, chewy texture. Stir-fried pea pod stems ($13.50) balance the bright flavor of fresh peas with a hefty garlic payload. Spicy salt calamari ($10.95) feature big pieces of squid bodies and clusters of tentacles, which have been lightly battered, expertly fried, and given gently searing heat with crushed dried red chilies.

Still, the aquarium show is GaGa’s main event. Live-tank head-on shrimp ($24.95/pound) are so much more vivid than their previously frozen cousins, offering a sensational burst of flavor in a dry-fried preparation. For elegance and richness, live-tank eel ($16.95/pound) in black bean sauce delivers magnificently. Presented in a spiral barely sliced through into bite-sized pieces, it boasts a dramatic, zebra-like contrast between glossy dark skin and meaty white flesh. And what are those small glossy-gray fish? The staff, patient and helpful, aren’t sure of the English name (we find out later with the help of our Cantonese-speaking friends), but they recommend slow-cooking in oil. What turns out to be live-tank marbled goby ($14.95/pound), a freshwater fish popular in Southeast Asia, is a subtle, mild, slightly bony fish topped with slivered scallions and fresh ginger. Its delicate, pristine flavor underscores the virtue of getting a dish from tank to kitchen to table in a few brief minutes. GaGa puts minimal effort into trappings, but its crystalline focus on simplicity and freshness serves to show that in a world obsessed with frippery, sometimes the beauty on the inside is what really counts.