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| - I was super pumped to finally try this place after having been a loyal worshipper of the Sichuan Gourmet enterprise. My fiance and I came for dinner on a Sunday night to see if this supposed spin-off measures up.
One of my biggest takeaways was that the service was night and day compared to the Squirrel Hill SG location. I wish that servers at Chinese restaurants like this were in the habit of introducing themselves, because our waitress was pretty awesome. The restaurant was fairly empty when we got there, but by the time we left, she was juggling numerous tables but still managed to return our check in like 30 seconds flat. The 3 dishes we ordered all came out incredibly quickly, before we even expected them. So yes, major kudos for service, Chengdu.
Onto the food. I had my favorite order of SPICY MULTI-MUSHROOM IN FLAMING PAN for comparison, and my S.O. tried the BEEF HO FUN NOODLES. The best thing about the mushrooms is that they weren't drowning in oil like they always are at SG. Besides that though, I didn't like the dish quite as much as SG's. It had some nice heat, and the mushroom mix included sliced plain white button mushrooms, enokis, white beech, some oyster shrooms, and some nice big chunks of king oyster shrooms, but I missed the shiitakes and straw mushrooms that SG includes. The dish just also didn't have as much depth of flavor, and the mushrooms didn't taste, for lack of a better word, as meaty. I know, I know. I'm super picky. It's not your fault, Chengdu Gourmet, your dish was plenty awesome. But if I had to pick a winner for flavor, Sichuan Gourmet wins out.
My very easy-to-please fiance loved his noodle dish, and the few slivers of onions and been sprouts I picked out of it were pretty decent in flavor, though I can't comment on the rest. Which leads me to my only major gripe about the food here. Both of our dishes pretty much lacked any veggies in them (the noodles literally had 8 lonely slivers of onion and maybe a dozen sprouts), which we've pretty much come to expect from the dishes at Sichuan, offering a nice contrast, especially to the very heavy meaty dishes. Both of our plates turned out very...brown. We tried to find a dish with a good mix of meat and veggies when we were ordering, but our waitress couldn't offer any strong suggestions, even after discussing it with a counterpart. They both lamented (in Mandarin) at our request that basically all their dishes are either all meat or all veggie. This probably isn't a big deal for most, but I grew up with a tradition of having something green on the table, so this just isn't peachy for me. I ended up ordering a CHINESE BROCCOLI QUICK FRIED IN BLACK PEPPER to compensate, which came out perfectly cooked--nice and crunchy with plenty of Sichuan peppercorn aroma--in under 5 minutes.
Thanks Chengdu for a great meal, and I'm glad I came to check it out, but I anticipate sticking with Sichuan Gourmet in the future, if for no other reason than they often offer sick deals on Restaurant.com and Groupon. Nothing tastier than a good bargain.
TL;DR: SG wins Most Variegated Dishes, CG wins Most Likely to Help You Avoid Clogged Arteries. The choice is yours.
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