Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant (Robson)

One of the only passable pho places in downtown Vancouver just bit the dust for some unfathomable reason. Vinada opened just a little over a year ago at 1260 Robson (still turns up in Google) and by some whim of fate never seemed to get the customers. With the cost of rent in downtown, unless you have a runaway hit like the pizza bistro Nook, which opened up a few months back and has been packed since day one due to a combination of appealing hip atmosphere and classy, bistro-style original pizza creations, then you'll be gone with the wind within the year. I've seen it happen to innumerable restaurants in the few years I've been living in the West End. I'm sad to see Vinada go. They had a superb menu of different Vietnamese noodle dishes, at a reasonable price. Downtown needs more reasonably priced restaurants. $12 mains for lunch is not reasonable.

It did not take long for someone to renovate the space and replace them once they disappeared overnight a few weeks ago. They have been replaced by a smaller location of the Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant, which has a main location at Commercial and 12th Ave. It is one of the more well known outlets for spicy Szechuan food in Vancouver.

It was strange walking into the newly-redecorated space. Memories of Vinada lingered. The thin strip of space in the interior is spare but well decorated, with a little wall of statuettes. Nonetheless the atmosphere is a little cold and forbidding, closer to the atmosphere of a high-end bistro, which feels somewhat inappropriate for a traditional Szechuan restaurant.

Service is attentive and prompt, which is more than could be said of Vinada, where you had to go to the main counter to ask for the check. But I would gladly exchange quality of service for reliably cheap and good fare. The equation is reversed at Chongqing. The food seems good but overpriced and not up to the level of the service.

I sampled the Dan Dan Noodle ($7.75) and Chongqing Chicken ($11.95), the first a typical dish that can be found in many Chinese restaurants and the second one of the region's specialties.



The wheat noodles in the Dan Dan Noodle bowl had an excellent consistency: firm but very chewy and not rubbery in the slightest. The noodles lay calmly, well folded, floating in a pool of thin red broth that was more flavorful and less spicy than it gave on - spicy enough to scream Szechuan but not so much as to make you sweat bullets. The problem came when I dug deeper down to discover a massive blob of what had the excessive sweetness and thick consistency of peanut butter. A little peanut sauce would be fine, but the dish was completely overwhelmed by the peanut buttery sweetness, fairly ruining what started out as a well-balanced dish.

The bowl of noodles was accompanied by a side of deep-fried pork cutlets that were far better than feared and went superbly well with the noodles, despite apparently not being in the slightest a traditional accompaniment to this dish. I felt that it was a good idea to serve them on the side rather than in the broth, so that you can appreciate different levels of flavor and the different textures. The price is about fair, especially with the generous side of pork cutlets, but the dish needs a bit of work in terms of the peanut aspect. A sprinkling of chopped peanuts would have been a far better idea. I also thought it might have been better off with a sauce rather than a soup broth, which is unusual for the dish. It's supposed to be noodles, not soup with noodles.

The chicken dish came out nice and hot. What seemed at first to be far too much food to finish, even between two people, proved to be slightly insufficient to leave the restaurant stuffed. The chicken was very flavorful and spicy at first bite, but very quickly the degree to which it was oversalted became apparent. It was also way too oily. The overzealous salting backfired by turning what would have been a fine, subtle regional staple into a taste being pounded into your head with a jackhammer. The chicken rested on a bed of fried spinach - a creative proposition at first glimpse, but one that falls apart upon closer examination. Imagine the consistency of soggy salad that has been lying in vinegar for too long. What would have been entirely satisfactory at a lower price point was downright disappointing at $11.95.

I sampled the Chongqing Chicken at the other Chongqing location, and if memory serves, they are prepared almost identically, serving up the same mixture of almost-goodness outweighed by gripes due to the completely inappropriate pricing. If this place fails, which appears to be the way the wind is blowing (a tumbleweed rolled by my table), then it will be no one's fault but their own for shooting for the stars without the proper equipment. Chinese restaurants with high price points thrive on the image of luxury, with huge dining rooms and big tables and big menus. The abbreviated menu at the Robson location would seem logically to have demanded a lowering of prices to cater to a more casual clientele, and failure to have thoroughly thought through their proposition may prove fatal. If they survive, it will be with the same opportunist nihilism that permits many execrable excuses for a restaurant to thrive by feeding overpriced slop to the tourists who flock down the nearby shopping blocks of Robson during the summer.

Another minor gripe was with the tea. The tea was watered down and had no flavor at all. I could barely tell whether it was supposed to be Jasmine or Pu-Erh. What does it say about a Chinese restaurant if they can't even brew a cup of Chinese tea?