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“We are also dedicated to using free-range chicken and other seasonal ingredients and vegetables,” says Zhu. Presentation at these new restaurants is far more intricate than Sichuan restaurants of New York’s past. A short walk away from One Fulton is DaXi, a plush night-clubby space in the New World Mall, where a dish of humongous pork ribs arrives in a yellow birdcage. Szechuan Mountain House serves razor-thin pork belly suspended from what looks like a children’s swing set, a presentation now seen at Chinese restaurants all over town, proving these innovations are positively contagious. Illustrating this phenomenon is a single modern development called One Fulton Square at the corner of Prince and Roosevelt — the block that once hosted Little Pepper and Spicy & Tasty — where there are now three gleaming Sichuan restaurants. Guan Fu, Szechuan Mountain House, and Szechwan Absolute present quite a contrast to their grittier predecessors, each with its own slightly different take on the cuisine.
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The chef left for a new restaurant on Broadway at 95th Street, and not long after, the Upper West Side became the city’s first hotbed of the cuisine. For many years, the mouth-numbing cuisine of Sichuan didn’t quite penetrate New York’s dining scene. This was at least partly because they were declared illegal in the U.S. in the ’60s due to the erroneous belief that they carried disease. Situated in China’s southwest, the cuisine of the Sichuan province has at its most basic element the Sichuan peppercorn native to the region, to which have been added several permutations of chiles, producing a tingling symphony of hotness. Other ingredients include ginger, garlic, beans, peanuts, pork, chicken, freshwater fish, and the province’s bounty of vegetables. Also on the novel side are round shrimp fritters sided with sliced spuds, like pink ping pong balls with paddles; and planks of mung bean starch in chile oil and Sichuan peppercorns that wiggle and wobble in a glistening array.
Szechuan House
Szechuan Mountain House Switches Up the Sichuan Standards - Eater NY
Szechuan Mountain House Switches Up the Sichuan Standards.
Posted: Fri, 17 Nov 2017 08:00:00 GMT [source]
“I really wanted to stay true to our menu and not make any compromises just to please what we thought the local crowd would find acceptable. For us, this is what a modern-day Sichuan restaurant would actually look like in Sichuan,” says Zhu. Szechuan Mountain House boasts a large fan base in New York, and its locations in Manhattan and Flushing frequently make the New York Times’s 100 Best Restaurants list and Eater NY’s list of 38 Essential Restaurants. It’s not uncommon for lines to regularly span wait times of an hour and a half or more. Manager Jerry Wang hopes that the restaurant will be just as well received in LA. Bring a group to this crowd-pleasing Midtown restaurant and share a bunch of dim sum and Szechuan dishes.
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And dishes are more diverse than ever, going far beyond the now well-known options like double-cooked pork and ma po tofu. Flushing’s Alley 41, a place aimed at younger diners with a cryptic entrance on a side street, offers, in addition to predictable Sichuan fare, options like spicy ground pork poured over mashed potatoes, and whole okras bristling from a bowl of peanut butter. Tucked away in the heart of Manhattan, Restaurant Mountain House Manhattan 川山甲 offers a truly unique dining experience that combines the best of Asian and Western cuisine. The menu is a food lover's dream, featuring an impressive selection of dishes that are sure to tantalize your taste buds. The same punning use of ingredients was found in the most spectacular dish of the afternoon, which went by the prosaic name of “beef sliced with enoki mushrooms in sour soup” ($20.95). It came in a handsome stoneware tureen worked with what looked like Roman friezes.
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The food is plainly plated at a few dollars less than at its Sichuan cotenants, and the menu is heavy with offal, bullfrog, and rarely seen vegetables like celtuce. New York’s embrace of the cuisine has meant new restaurants across the price spectrum. Some of the city’s more ambitious Sichuan restaurants have upped the price expectations to $50 or so per person at a communal table, where a group is necessary to sample enough dishes. In those places, a less-expensive take on dishes like wontons in hot oil, mapo tofu, and dan dan noodles are available at prices that hover around $10. The floodgates have been opened where Sichuan peppercorns are concerned; where once you were lucky to get a little tingle on your tongue, Sichuan food these days mounts a Novocaine-like assault on your mouth, rendering a gulp of cold water useless.
According to William Clifford’s The Insiders’ Guide to Chinese Restaurants in New York (1970), the first restaurant in the city to even “claim full allegiance to Szechuan” was Szechuan Taste at 23 Chatham Square. Sure, there had been previous restaurants that boasted a menu with a few Sichuan dishes, such as double-cooked pork or eggplant with garlic sauce. But none were quite like this place, which listed tea-smoked duck and braised whole carp with chiles among its chef’s specials.
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A bowl of free pickled vegetables and chiles greeted us as we sat down and examined the soft-opening menu, which was on a single double-sided page. We relived our Flushing experience by ordering the pork belly and cucumber ($10.95), and it was even better than the first time. The atmosphere at Mountain House is always lively and energetic, yet never overwhelming. The staff is attentive and friendly, making sure that every guest feels welcome and well taken care of.
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The food was indeed heavenly, and it prepared us for the spicy and offal-intensive Sichuan soon to arrive. Overall, Restaurant Mountain House Manhattan 川山甲 offers an unforgettable dining experience that is sure to leave you craving more. Whether you're in the mood for Asian cuisine, Western fare, or a fusion of both, this restaurant has something for everyone. The menu was thankfully crawling with offal; we ordered “strapping cattle throat with spicy red chile oil” ($10.95), which sounds like the work of some unhinged cowboy. It was delicious, though the strips of flayed bovine throat might as well have been squarish white noodles.
Liang yi, which translates to “hanging clothes” in Mandarin, is intended to evoke the image of laundry hung to dry on a clothesline. Together with a slice of cucumber, the thin pork belly is dipped in chile oil with a wad of minced garlic. The translucently thin slices of pork and cucumber are presented draped over a miniature wooden rack above a minced garlic and chile oil dipping sauce.
Some are served in novel presentations involving props and tableside service, ramping up the excitement level. Plus, the new crop of Sichuan restaurants is competing for customers who are more discerning than ever before. The punning part came with the mushrooms, which we teased out in little waving clumps. It was difficult to tell them apart from the bundles of rice noodles, which were tied in the middle like sheaves of wheat. It seemed, as we compared visits, that the East Village Mountain House is better than the one in Flushing, and indeed, one of the best and most interesting new Sichuan restaurants in town.
The charms of Sichuan cuisine are multiple — from mellow tea-smoked duck, to whole braised fish smothered in fiery fermented bean sauce, to cold diced rabbit with chiles and peanuts, to hot pots, noodles, soups, and stir fries. Pete Wells at the Times bestowed three stars on Guan Fu, a restaurant with an antique atmosphere and dishes like a sleek ma po tofu that’s not as hot as many but still highly flavored. And Szechwan Absolute offers a colorful modernistic elegance, with chandeliers, orange lattice decorations on gray walls, and a cherry blossom mural.
The meat arrives still partly attached to the bone, to be removed and dramatically warmed over a flaming boat of oil by the diner. Still, even with increased visibility of the term Sichuan, the city’s propensity for the milder food of Cantonese cuisine seemed to prevail. These newcomers are not only serving food more fiery and flavor-packed, they’re ransacking recipe collections for dishes not previously seen here, and inventing new ones as well.
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