Restaurant Review: SICHUAN LAB
February 26, 2020
Nothing swizzles your serotonin like Szechuan food: Seared string beans with ground pork-chilies-garlic. Nubbins of crisp chicken tossed with dried hot chilies-peanuts-ginger-garlic. A fish scored and deep-fried like an Outback Bloomin’ Onion in sweet-and-sour sauce. Cuke salad. Pot stickers, so on.
So delicious! But so predictable. Where are the Szechuan innovators? Innovation is the unlisted ingredient in the truly great culinary accomplishments from Vichyssoise to Potato Chips to Thomas Keller’s Oysters with Tapioca. Without innovation restaurants, like people, must surely decline. Rare is the Szechuan restaurant that utilizes this ingredient. Sichuan Lab does.
Their rendition of duck breast and leg would be as likely on any other Szechuan menu as macs and cheese. Cooked sous vide -- a French technique you’ve never before seen applied to Asian cuisine, at 52 degrees centigrade, a temperature clearly designated by the Almighty -- it’s sublime. The duck is served mid-point between medium and medium rare, an ideal rarely achieved. It is remarkably ducky, tender, moist, slightly salty and, for an added layer of bliss, perfumed by smoke (that you suspect comes from tea leaves). The lacquered skin isn’t crisp but it doesn’t matter it’s so flavorful and free of fat. Cleverly served on hot stones, with accompanying steamed buns, it is memorable, equal in its way to the seraphic duck breast you’ve had at Amber (aglow from its binary stars).
Fantastically good sous-vide duck.
Sichuan Lab’s clear noodles in their Szechuan-style Tossed Clear Noodles with Spicy Sauce are housemade. Although countless HK restaurants make fresh wheat noodles, and Chua Lam’s Pho makes thrilling rice noodles, you know of no other restaurant that makes their own clear noodles. You dearly love clear noodles for their gelatinous chewiness which is akin to gummy worms (which you also love). You’re pretty certain these are made from mung bean starch (others are made from sweet potato starch) and they are chubbier than any you’ve had before so there’s more chewy gelatinous goodness. The noodles are lapped by a wonderful chili sauce that not only delivers the heat of chilies but also their flavor.
Such utterly delicious and chubby chubby chubby clear noodles!
Their Spiced Local Pork in Garlic and Soy Sauce is crowned by a large topknot of fresh minced garlic. It is unabashed as though to say, if you don’t like it, tough noogies, it is what it is, deal with it. In other words, this dish has moxie which you, like any New York boy, approve. The only other place you’ve seen garlic served like this is at rustic Ah Chun Shandong Dumpling. You wish the sauce itself was equally brash – spicier, saltier, sourer. Still, you like the way Sichuan Lab is willing to go both high and low in their quest for best.
Spiced Local Pork in Garlic and Soy Sauce
Sautéed Eggplants with Minced Pork in a Chili Garlic Sauce is somewhat pallid. More saltiness and spice would energize the dish. And you wish that the eggplants had more sear or had been deep-fried in batter or crumbs. The dish is a bit of a mush and your palate seeks a crisp textural element as a contrast and flavor enhancer. Slices of water chestnut might also help deliver this.
Sauteed Eggplants with Minced Pork in a Chili Garlic Sauce
You feel the same regarding their Tan Tan Noodles which needs to be feistier. Your tongue forlornly seeks more capsaicin, soy, vinegar and sesame.
Tan Tan Noodles
Kung Pao Chicken and Ma Po Bean Curd with Minced Beef are merely good though you appreciate the tang of Szechuan peppercorn in each, often absent elsewhere. They would be greater yet, in your view, if they’d used fresh, green Szechuan peppercorns, which is what the archangels eat at Szechuan restaurants in Heaven. The Kung Pao would have been greater you think if the chicken had been crisped.
Kung Pao Chicken
Ma Po Beancurd
Your party orders three desserts. First is a scoop of housemade vanilla ice cream flavored with Szechuan green peppercorn. Certainly, cinnamon blends well with vanilla ice cream as do clove, cardamom, and nutmeg. You highly doubt that mustard, fennel, or caraway do. And Szechuan peppercorns, even green ones, don’t. It’s like that ubiquitous cliché, a margarita with chili (which happens to be on their drink menu). Margaritas will still be with us in ten years. You are confident though that Darwinian forces will have extinguished the chilies.
Housemade Vanilla Ice Cream flavored with Green Peppercorns
Their crème brulee is based on soy milk which gets an A for novelty but that’s all. A great crème brulee has a large surface area of satisfying burnt sugar compared to the volume of custard. This one, deeper than it is wide, does not. Moreover, soy milk totally lacks the rich, satisfying mouth-feel that comes from an egg custard or even a panna cotta made with cream.
Soy Milk Creme Brulee
Okinawa Brown Sugar Glutinous Rice Cakes are shaped like piano keys, deep fried, served hot in a splotch of brown sugar sauce. You like their chewiness and crispiness. However, you feel the dish needs one more major contrasting element. A flavored ice cream – chestnut! – would be great. Keep the brown sugar sauce but add a tot of rum or brandy or bourbon (or maybe Maotai!) and let the customer pour it from a small pitcher. OR, pour it over and set it on fire. There’s nothing so elegant as blue flames in a darkened restaurant.
Okinawa Brown Sugar Glutinous Rice Cakes
Sichuan Lab’s drink menu is aspirational, much like the drink menus you find at most expat troughs in Soho. There are the usual ten-ingredient cocktails and mocktails, all expensive, even at Happy Hour. There are expensive wines, though it’s questionable in your mind if any wines at all go with Szechuan food. And there are upscale beers you’ve never heard of from Spain, Belgium, Germany. You only wish that they had Tsing Tao, a beer that should not be dismissed, shaped by socio-cultural forces to go with Szechuan. In other words, the drink menu needs modest drinks at modest prices, not just strange concoctions for well-heeled expats with tattoos on their ankles. It’s an auxiliary revenue unit, hardly more.
The interior is dim and much of the furniture is orange which you’d think, being the color of Donald Trump’s complexion, would induce dread but, in fact, works elegantly. The night you visited, you were quite early and were the only customers. So, service was fine, if slightly distracted. Food is plated with particular beauty using a florist’s shop of flower blossoms and baby greens.
Interior
Two of their dishes were stellar, the others a bit meek perhaps for fear of offending tender palates. Given Sichuan Lab’s willingness to lob a mortar shell of fresh garlic on the cold pork dish, this perplexes you. You want them to jack the voltage. Perhaps you’re habituated to too much voltage and the fault is yours.
Sichuan Lab is expensive, but considering what they deliver, not unreasonably. A blow-out, gluttonous meal for four, including a number of dishes not listed above as well as drinks and service charge, came to about 2400 HKD. Had sanity prevailed it would have been less than half that price. Menu items at Little Chili in North Point, your go-to Szechuan restaurant, are about half the price. But they don’t have the duck. And their clear noodle dish, while good, has less torque.
You admire how many of Sichuan Lab’s dishes that don’t light you up – notably the desserts – are still innovative. Sichuan Lab doesn’t bunt. Frankly, most of their food, while good, does not lift you into orbit. But you’ll eagerly return just for the sous-vide duck and their housemade clear noodles, which do. Only the most knowledgeable kitchen, helmed by a serious chef, could produce these dishes. And you have a hunch there are other hidden gems on their menu, perhaps some of the following, which you hope to try next visit: Crispy Paper Thin Beef Slices, Crispy Chicken Dices with Dried Chilies and Sichuan Peppercorns, Braised Spicy Chilean Sea Bass Balls with Broad Bean Paste, Tossed Chilled Hand-Made Noodles with Pork Slices in Spicy Garlic Soy Sauce.
Chocolate Lab. Yellow Lab. Chesapeake Lab. If you knew no better you might say that Sichuan Lab was a new category of Labrador Retriever. That’s okay. For, while it isn’t there yet, it has all the makings of a top dog.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 3.5
Ambiance: 3.5
Service: 3.5
Overall Value: 3.5
SICHUAN LAB
G/F, 28 Tai Wo St, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
+852 3126 6633