Lakeside Chinese Deli was the kind of restaurant that often looked closed even when it was, in fact, still open. So I figured reports of its demise must have been mistaken.

The old hole punched into its sign and the frequently half-drawn window blinds were simply the ideal camouflage from Chinatown tourists who weren't adventurous enough to pass through its unassuming door.

For those that did, Lakeside was the ultimate joint. It was home to some of the best hand-crafted dim sum I've ever eaten. And I refused to believe the distress calls e-mailed from readers reporting that it had really closed for good.

"PLEASE tell me I'm wrong . . . I'm in half a panic," wrote Michael Feuda.

"Say it ain't so!!" wrote John Dougherty, who was crestfallen when he saw the sign announcing the owners' retirement taped to Lakeside's door.

I went to investigate, and the bad news was obvious. The retirement notice was there and the door was ajar, and inside, Lakeside's no-frills tile dining room was in mid-demolition shambles.

Then a Chinatown miracle happened.

I closed my eyes for a moment to imagine the final lunch I never got to taste - the steaming green mounds of tiny bok choy studded with cloves of garlic, the platters of yawning clams overflowing with soy-tinged pork and peppers, the little dim-sum dishes laden with frilly-edged pork-and-peanut dumplings and crispy chiu chow squares of shrimp and water chestnut.

When I opened my eyes, Lakeside's owners were there. Brenda and Woon Leung had been passing in front of their old storefront at that very moment, and at the familiar sight of an old customer, Brenda stopped to chat. (Though I'd written about Lakeside many times, they had never realized who I was.)

"I haven't been able to sleep," she confided. "I miss my customers so much. But we are also very tired."

The Leungs hardly look retiring age - Brenda is 57, chef Woon is 61. But after 32 years in business, including nearly two decades at Lakeside, it was time to turn off the woks. Woon had trained some of Chinatown's best cooks over the years, including Brenda's brother, Eric Ng, who ran Lakeside's kitchen in recent years. But Woon had also successfully undergone treatments related to throat cancer. He needed to slow down.

But I wondered about that last meal. Would Woon indulge just one more student, and teach me to make those special dishes so that Lakeside's legacy would not be lost? In honor of the Chinese New Year (that's today), we made a plan.

We gathered high above Chinatown in the galley kitchen of a penthouse condo occupied by the Leungs' son, Warren, and we were ready to cook.

The morning had been spent shopping for ingredients. We picked out velveteen-leafed Shanghai bok choy and a bag of tight-lipped littleneck clams from Canada at the 4 Seasons grocery on 10th Street. At the Chung May market on Race Street, Woon led us to packages of wheat starch, to be mixed with a smidge of cornstarch for the silky white dumpling skins.

We found his preferred brand of oyster sauce (Lee Kum Kee), the dark mushroom-flavored soy, the canned water chestnuts, and the salty pickled radish. Be sure the bean-curd sheets used for the chiu chow rolls are soft and pliant, he warned, crumbling the edges of one noticeably dry package.

With all the ingredients finally around us, though, it was clear the old pro wasn't comfortable in the tight quarters of this underpowered galley kitchen. The dish towels he used as hot pads kept catching fire. He kept glancing behind himself for ingredients, the reflex of a master chef used to being flanked by a staff of prep cooks.

Warren filled that role admirably, having worked in the restaurant many years before becoming a pharmacist. And with his help as wok-washer and assistant, Woon quickly got into the groove, working in stages to build layers of flavor, cooking the individual elements of four separate dishes, then setting them aside for the final meticulous assembly.

He wok-poached the bok choy in water with a touch of oil to intensify its vivid green. The meat-and-peanut stuffing was cooked and seasoned, then left to cool before the dumpling skins were made. Clams were slowly simmered with the lid off to prevent them from becoming chewy. When they were tossed in the wok with the sauce of marinated pork and peppers, we sat down to devour the first of two courses.

The bok choy was a joy, snappy little balls of chlorophyll tossed with soft garlic cloves that had been fried to a sweet golden brown. The clams, their shells packed with salty dark crumbles of meat, were impossible to stop eating.

But Woon wasn't pleased, missing the high-heat power of his battery of industrial woks.

"Eighty percent," he said, waving his hand at the bok choy. Looking at the clams, he pronounced, "Seventy percent."

In a pause between courses, Brenda brought out the old photos. There was a picture from 1974 of them as young newlyweds in Hong Kong, fresh from their wedding arranged by Woon's "auntie." The next day, he brought her to Philadelphia, where he had a job at the original Imperial Inn.

There was a picture of Brenda's mother, Yuk, lighting firecrackers in front of Lakeside on its first day, March 18, 1989.

"Very lucky number," said Brenda, referring to the date. "And look, no hole in the sign!"

Of course, Brenda refused to fix the sign for 10 years after a beer bottle from a bar fight across the street flew right through their facade. "Good luck," she said.

And indeed, this bare-bones little dining room was always filled with the joy of a dedicated crowd - most of them Chinatown locals - who came to eat some of the most carefully crafted food in town. No shortcuts. Even the hot oil dipping sauce made from three kinds of chiles was prepared in-house.

Woon trained more than his share of cooks in his years at Riverside, their first restaurant, and Lakeside. He proudly names Ong's, Lee How Fook, and Pho Xe Lua as places to encounter his proteges.

But I know as we sit down to this final course of crispy chiu chow rolls and downy white dumplings that I'll never quite taste these flavors again. I help him whip the shrimp and water-chestnut stuffings. I take a lesson rolling the delicate dumpling skins, carefully crimping the pleated seams in the crook of my thumb and forefinger.

"Seventy percent," he says critically of the final dumplings, clearly missing the comfort of his old restaurant haunt.

But they are, in fact, delicious. The rolls are snappy and crisp, with the little crunch of water chestnut inside. The dumplings are an ethereal translucent white, with perfectly scalloped edges harboring sweet meat and roasty nuts inside. I am positively beaming as we polish off the entire lunch.

Brenda pours another glass of yellow chrysanthemum tea, then walks over to the kitchen, where she tenderly massages Woon's shoulders and says: "Now you can retire."

You can find the recipes here! :)

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/food/20080207_Wok-star_treatment.html