Hunan Delight Matsuya
Chinese & Japanese Cuisine

One phone number, one address. And then there’s the matter of the handwritten sign that reads “FREE WINE” in the window.

What.

I’ve been perplexed by this little restaurant Upper East Side since I moved into the area last spring. What is this, Chinese and Japanese fusion?*

The take-away menus reveal that it’s two restaurants — Hunan Delight, a Chinese restaurant, and Matsua Japanese cuisine — cohabitating in one space. Now, that’s just gross.*

Well, except, it’s not. The food’s actually really good.

We came for the free wine, the Chinese food (after I found out Hunan Delight gets rave reviews online, to my surprise) and maybe a California roll. It’s hard to mess up a roll made of crab stick, avocado and cucumber.

What we found:

— Free wine, a glass of cheap but crisp and very drinkable white wine, per person

— One of my new favorite Chinese dishes, called Green Jade Chicken ($11.95), plump white meat pieces woked over high heat in “chef’s spicy sauce” (not really that spicy) along with matchstick-sized pieces of fresh ginger and string beans. In the heat, the sauce caramelizes into a crisp, light crust. This dish is the exact antithesis to the soggy, fatty, greasy Chinese food of styrofoam yore. It’s lovely.

— And the sushi? You can find far worse sushi in supermarkets everywhere. Entranced by the platter of Dragon Rolls the sushi chef was putting up on the counter (see below) … so we ordered one.

It turned out to be a cooked roll (I still haven’t tried the raw sushi here) — shrimp tempura and cucumber on the inside, wrapped in eel and avocado on the outside.

— Doting, attentive service, of the sort you only get at a restaurant where the proprietors are that hands on, that involved, with everything.

There was a certain activity in the restaurant the night we were there, tables being reconfigured, the sushi chef turning out dragon rolls like nobody’s business, a party of young twenty-somethings turns up with a bottle of Johnny Walker — turns out, on this particular night the restaurant was hosting a private Chinese New Year feast of epic proportions after the restaurant closed (11p). Being the last guests in the restaurant, they invited us to join … we declined.

Hunan Delight, a Chinese restaurant, and Matsuya Sushi, Japanese cuisine, share 1467 York Avenue, at 78th Street, 212-628-8161

*This opinion comes from the utmost respect for each cuisine’s ingredients, technique and cultural history — although one of these days I’d love to really study and dissect the menus, to suss out any unintended fusion that’s happening.