Szechuan Garden has filled the long-vacant space of Dahmen’s Pizza. With a few tweaks here and there, it has a chance to be an excellent Chinese restaurant.
The menu has both an Americanized Chinese section–sesame chicken, cashew chicken, etc.–and a traditional Szechuan section, from which I made my selections.
My first pick was the spicy braised pigs feet ($16.95). Generally, pigs feet have at least some meat on them, but these had basically none. Still, the little meat that was there was tender, and the sauce was tasty but not at all spicy.
I also had high expectations for the spicy noodle soup with beef. Alas, the red broth was surprisingly bland and only mild in spice level. You do get a lot of udon noodles and an appropriate amount of beef and bok choy.
You could eat here two meals a day but still take weeks to try everything on the large menu. Next time, I’ll probably have either the stir-fried fish filet dipped in oil ($21.95) or the farm-style stir-fried pork ($13.95).
Szechuan Garden also has a seafood boil, featuring shrimp, crawfish, mussels and the like. I got mine with blue crab ($7 for 0.5 lbs, $12 for 1 lb) and added fish balls ($4.50 for small, $7.75 for large).
First, I want to note that you will definitely need the plastic gloves that accompany this messy dish. The cajun sauce is flavorful with lots of spices (the other sauce choice is garlic butter). Unfortunately, the crab had very little meat on them, even for crab. At least that was made up by a generous portion of the fish balls, which weren’t too chewy and absorbed the sauce fairly well.
Szechuan Garden is open every day for lunch and dinner.
