Crustacean Restaurant   

Owner Helene An recreates her great-grandfather's royal French-Colonial estate at her Beverly Hills haven of Euro-charged Vietnamese seafood. Chilean sea bass competes with giant grilled tiger prawns and Dungeness crab for space on An's menu, a favorite of folks such as Wesley Snipes and Mickey Rourke, whose careers may have recently encountered said crabs somewhere along the ocean floor. The two-level dining room boasts a bamboo grove and marble floors, a 6,000-gallon sunken aquarium and a footbridge over the restaurant's koi pond. What's more, all of Crustacean's dishes are prepared in a secret kitchen that jealously guards An's proprietary family recipes, the only thing of value she took from her native Saigon after the city's Communist takeover in 1975. Now An, with the help of her three daughters, doles out those secrets in the form of shrimp tempura in citrus-ginger sauce, New Zealand green-lip mussels broiled in Asian pesto, and other fanciful concoctions that liven up Beverly Hills' Golden Triangle.