Szechuan Kitchen big on flavour
Szechuan Kitchen big on value and flavour
The first month of the year is always a difficult one.
The bathroom scale warned you about eating all those shortbread cookies in December, but you didn’t listen. The weather makes you want to never leave the house until April and reality replaces revelry, as one now finds credit card bills instead of Christmas cards in the mailbox.
These are the days of tighter budgets to be sure but, happily, there are still places to eat in this city that won’t break the bank, while keeping your tastebuds and your belly happy.
I met a friend at Szechuan Kitchen on a particularly frigid Sunday night. This was a first time visit for me, but a good friend raves about the spring rolls every time he comes to Saskatoon. We settled in with a cup of green tea and perused the giant menu with more than 120 selections. The emphasis is on Szechuan, Cantonese and Vietnamese cuisine.
Appetizers include the usual wings and wontons, dumplings and egg rolls, but we had to have the spring rolls. All apps are under $9, and serve at least two people. This place does a lot of soup; the hard part is picking what you want to have. Wonton, hot and sour, dumpling, egg noodle. Most are under $10.
Then there is Pho, that fabulous Vietnamese rice noodle soup. Just pick your protein chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, some satay style, some not. All are under $11, and more than enough for one person. The beef satay came wildly recommended, thus that’s what we ordered. There are various Vietnamese vermicelli noodle bowls, all under $11, and are the most popular thing on the menu, according to our waitress.
The rest of the menu offers the usual items you’re accustomed to. Not many scoot above the $10 price point. One must have fried rice, and we went for the veggie, along with a long noodle dish of Szechuan chow mein. Apparently it’s good luck to eat long noodles at the beginning of a new year.
There is the beloved ginger beef but we both agreed we needed more vegetables in our lives, thus chose the vegetables braised with bean curd.
We barely had time to remark how red the room is (it’s very red) before the spring rolls and satay beef pho were placed on our table. My gosh. The spring rolls are unreal. You might need to brace yourself. The filling is perfectly seasoned meat, and the crispy exterior has that lovely crunch and deep-fried goodness. These are what all other spring rolls in the city hope to be. I think each of us could have eaten four. Now I know why my friend picks up an order before he starts the road trip back to Calgary.
The pho was also tremendously delicious. I tasted ginger, garlic, five-spice powder and loved the chopped peanut garnish. The beef was tender, and there was plenty of it. At only $8.25 for a giant bowl, I’ll gladly pick this up on nights I don’t feel like cooking. The vegetables braised with bean curd was a sleeper hit.
The Szechuan chow mein long noodle dish was tasty, with plenty of meat and vegetables, but like the veggie fried rice, it was a tad on the bland side and I likely would order something else on my next trip. Ginger beef, I’m looking at you. All of this food came to just over $40 and would have fed four of us instead of two. My only regret is that I didn’t take an order of spring rolls along for the road.