Home > Restaurants > Chinese > Szechuan Gourmet

Several Chinese restaurants have opened recently in downtown Flushing, and Szechuan Gourmet is one of the most noteworthy.

The pale-yellow dining room accented with bright red and gold paper lanterns has an intimate feel, with only about a dozen tables spaciously positioned on the white marble tile floor. My favorite part of the decor is a collection of about 30 teapots - delicate ceramics fashioned into a ship, a gnarled log and other fanciful shapes displayed in a glass case.

Sichuan cuisine is best known for its fiery flavors, but its range is complex, mixing sweet and sour, salty and bitter, spicy and savory. Still, hot chiles, garlic and the pungent aromatic red berries called pepper flowers are heavily used, so if you have a low threshold for highly seasoned foods, let your waiter know.

To start the meal, we had spicy Sichuan noodles. Cooked al dente, they were tossed in a bright red sauce, packed with chopped garlic, ginger and red peppers, as well as a scattering of fresh bean sprouts for an unexpected occasional crunch. The Cheng Du noodles were in a milder, brown sauce, but were also packed with flavor from lots of fresh ginger and garlic.

Soups also make good openers. The house special pork soup, which easily served three, had a rich, mildly flavored broth, not at all greasy, that was filled with diced pork, oyster mushrooms, rice vermicelli noodles and Chinese greens.

Among the entrees, I especially enjoyed the fetchingly named "enchanted pork," a delicious dish, combining thin slices of pork belly, yellow leeks and hot green peppers in a savory, brown sauce, enlivened by garlic, ginger and the fragrant Sichuan peppers.

The kung pao chicken also was excellent, with tender morsels of diced chicken, crunchy peanuts and whole, red peppers stir-fried together and in a brown sauce, flavored with ginger, garlic and Sichuan peppers. The shredded beef with hot peppers was among the least interesting dishes I tasted; the meat, boiled first then stir-fried, was tender, but lacked flavor.

Of the vegetable dishes, I enjoyed the vegetable trio in garlic sauce, a comparatively mildly flavored dish combining Chinese eggplant, asparagus and dried green beans. The dish, a lovely mix of colors, used prime produce packed with natural flavor; the white flesh of the pale purple-skinned eggplant melted in my mouth while the asparagus had a slight crunch.

The hot pepper with potatoes, a somewhat simple dish of julienned white potatoes lightly sauteed in oil so they weren't cooked through, was spiced with garlic and thinly sliced hot green peppers. The thin potato threads tasted especially good, tossed and mixed in with other dishes.

No desserts are on the menu. But, if you want a sweet treat to end your meal, consider the appetizer sesame bean paste, a green, chewy dumpling made with sweet rice flour and stuffed with a slightly sweet paste of black sesame seeds.

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