Sichuan Garden

The spice of western China comes to Brookline Village. Could this mark a revival of the all-Szechuan menu?

by Robert Nadeau

295 Washington Street, Brookline Village; 734-1870
Open Sun. - Thurs., 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.;
Fri. and Sat.,11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa
Full bar
Access up a threshold bump from sidewalk level

One of my fondest hopes, as interest develops in regionally authentic Asian food, is for Boston to rebuild its supply of Mandarin-Szechuan restaurants. The spicy food from the western parts of China was enormously popular here from the '60s through the '80s; then it mysteriously faded, in terms of both the number of restaurants serving it and the cheffery of those that remained. Despite improved relations with China and an increasing population of northern and western Chinese immigrants, especially in some of the suburban towns like Brookline, the food has never really returned to the peak of quality and influence that it enjoyed from around 1980 to 1983. Every few years a good new Szechuan restaurant arrives, like Chef Lee's (in Somerville), or the revived Mary Chung (in Central Square), or this year's tiny East Asia restaurant (also in Somerville). But there are still old fans of this cuisine who keep finding each other at parties and asking, "Where do you get a good bowl of hot-and-sour soup these days?"

Sichuan Garden, a pretty new place in the shell of an undistinguished "everything" Chinese restaurant, really tries to be a purely Szechuan restaurant, and often succeeds. Not all the unfamiliar dishes will please the old fans of Peking on Mystic or Joyce Chen's Small Eating Place, and some of the standard dishes can be perfunctory. But there's more than enough going on here for several exploratory visits and possibly some lifetime favorites.

This is especially true if you like Szechuan food as it has been presented in Taiwan, with rather more emphasis on batter-frying. (The deep-fry step is reportedly a product of Portuguese influence on Japanese food, and the long Japanese occupation of Taiwan.) If General Tso's chicken ($8.95) is your dish, the one here is especially crunchy and tasty, with thoroughly fried chicken fritters in a ginger sweet-and-sour sauce, with just a hint of chili-pepper flavor from the dried pods stir-fried in. (Just a hint, that is, unless you eat one, in which case the hint will turn into a screaming reminder: Don't eat the dried chili peppers!) All I've ever been able to learn about General Tso is that he was Hunanese and a gourmand, and probably that he lived in the 19th century, though I once read an Internet message from someone who claimed to have gone to school with General Tso's son.

Also in the batter-fried area is sesame beef ($9.95), which is steak in slices a little large for chopsticks (one was a three-inch square). The beef is mild-tasting, almost like free-range veal, and the sesame taste comes from sesame seeds in a thick, light-brown sauce.

Some of the more unusual Szechuan dishes here come as appetizers, described in rather unappetizing translations and available in several combinations. We tried the largest of those, "assorted delicacies" ($20.95), which comprised five different dishes with contrasting textures but familiar flavors. The most familiar item was cold five-spice beef ($5.95 alone) in thin slices from a deliberately gristly cut, possibly shin. The centerpiece was julienned jellyfish with "scallion pesto" ($5.95 alone), tasteless ribbons of white, translucent stuff that is both limp and crunchy. Well, have a bite and check it off your life list. I much prefer sliced beef tendon with roasted-chili vinaigrette ($5.95) -- pure gristle in elegant thin slices with a titillating orange hot sauce -- and the similar but crunchier shredded tripe with roasted-chili vinaigrette ($4.95), which also had more cilantro and scallion. Everyone liked the shredded chicken with hoisin sauce ($4.95).

Of the more typical dishes, the hot-and-sour soup ($1.75) was good, not great. But the "Sichuan pork dumpling with roasted chili vinaigrette" ($3.50), a dish popular in Cambridge as "suan la chow sho," is superb, with steamed fresh dumplings in a thickened soy-chili sauce with some of the distinctive Szechuan peppercorns. Plain "pan seared pork dumpling" ($3.95) are large Peking ravioli at a good price, but ours were thick-skinned and floury. Great dipping sauce, though.

Tasting around the menu, especially those selections in red, we were quite pleased with "Camphur tea-smoked duck" (half, $12.95) served on the bone, but plenty meaty under the layer of fat, and one of the most thoroughly smoked Chinese ducks ever. "Chef's ma paul tofu" ($6.95) was a high-quality rendition of this Szechuan classic, soft bean curd stir-fried with pork and Szechuan peppercorns and chili paste for a kind of highly spicy comfort food. (I like the leftovers reheated in a tortilla.)

Baby eggplant with spicy garlic sauce ($6.95) was another winner, falling short only because the similar "chili eggplant" at East Asia restaurant in Somerville gets so much more sweetness from the same vegetable with less oil. "Sauteed stringbeans with Chengdu city spiced" ($6.95) was a mild dish of beans decorated with minced pork and scallions. This is one dish where I actually think the American green beans are tastier than the original Chinese yard-long beans. The Chengdu spices were as hard to locate in the dish as the capital of Szechuan is on an old map. But what we had was an ideal dish of winter green beans.

Stir-fried sea scallops with chili cucumber ($11.95) was made with real sea scallops, whose flavor came through quite a powerful dark sauce of ginger and red-pepper paste. With a little more attention to balance, this could become a signature dish.

On the other hand, a dish of sautéed shredded potatoes with green peppers ($6.95) treats the white potato like a Chinese vegetable, and cooks it only lightly to retain the crunch. The result isn't poisonous, but it hasn't much flavor and didn't win me over to cooking potatoes this way. The equally fine shredding of carrots, scallions, and cabbage in an order of shrimp lo mein ($5.95) added a lot to this ordinary dish, however.

Sichuan Garden is a pretty room, done mostly in green with some blond wood and watercolors, with Western classical music. Dvorak doesn't really go with Chinese food, but it's still better than the Gipsy Kings. The initial crowd is mostly Asian-American, and they can't all be relatives. Some kind of word was put out.