From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published April 16, 2008 Eastern 2$ Harvey: 1801 Manhattan Blvd. 368-0788 Lunch and dinner seven days. AE DS MC V Asian restaurants have a way of looking much better inside than out. The Eastern carries this to an extreme. Outside, it looks like any of dozens of other Asian restaurants in other strip malls. Inside, however, it borders on magnificent. The second surprise waiting for you here is that the place is bicultural. Not Pan-Asian, but Dual-Asian: Chinese and Japanese. The menu lists over a hundred Chinese dishes, not counting lunch specials. Then it lists many Japanese standards. And there's a full-service sushi bar. The Japanese is better than the Chinese. But even the latter is well above average. This is good news for West Bankers, who only recently began to get any sushi at all. It's also a glad tiding if you order a Chinese entree. Let's face it: the standard Chinese appetizers long ago wore out their welcome from the adventuresome palate. Yes, pot stickers are good, and so is shrimp toast. But who, really, needs to eat another egg roll, Chinese rib, or crab Rangoon? The sushi bar opens up a wealth of other first-course options. Also here is good tuna tataki. Seared along the edges and doused with ponzu, it's fresh, sharp, and appetizing. Baked mussels with a glazed mayonnaise sauce and beef negimaki (grilled sliced beef wrapped around a bundle of green onions) are other good starters. A few tempuras and teriyakis constitute most of the remainder of the Japanese selection. The miso soup is decent. But not as good as the Chinese hot and sour soup or the house special seafood soup (best ordered for the whole table; ask to have it on the spicy side).  But it's really time to move to the Chinese side. Chinese main courses here range from chow mein all the way up to Beijing (Peking) duck. The usual range of styles is here: the mild Cantonese dishes, the spicier Szechuan and Hunan concoctions, and a few Mandarin selections.  Twice-cooked pork, a beautiful presentation covered by one-inch squares of cabbage leaves that look as though they'd fallen from a tree, has all the sweet-and-spicy complexity I look for in that. The steak kew is chunks of good beef with a variety of mushrooms and a savory, black-peppery sauce: excellent.  None of it is the best of my life, but the kitchen is competent on most dishes. They even do reasonably well with the curry-flavored Singapore noodles, a great spicy dish. Chinese restaurateurs have known for a long time that their customers lose control of their rational minds when many proteins are thrown together in a single dish. I am here to remind you that when chicken, pork, beef, and shrimp come together with even more kinds of vegetables, the flavors don't add--they subtract. Restrain yourself from ordering such total combos, which are numerous here. The service staff is eager to please but heavily ethnic; be patient. There's more than the typical amount of wine, and beer from both China and Japan. Most entrees just under $10. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.