Red Pepper Sichuan Bistro

I have long lamented that there aren't any really good Chinese restaurants in northern Baltimore County. There are plenty of smaller American-style Chinese carry-outs, and Szechuan House, which has always been hit or miss. (They deliver, however, so that is definitely in their favor.) When I read in Kit Pollard's Hot Plate column for Baltimore Fishbowl that a new Sichuan restaurant opened on Allegany Avenue, we visited post haste, hoping for the best.

Red Pepper Sichuan Bistro is a rather expansive restaurant with a soothing decor and not particularly comfortable, unpadded, Chinese-style wooden chairs. The kitchen is also large and visible through a plate glass window at the back of the restaurant. Continuing the size theme is the menu, a glossy tome featuring not only lists of available dishes, but also helpful photographs of nearly all of them. Another theme of Red Pepper is spicy, which of course one would expect to find in a restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Sichuan province. My kinda food.

I'm always attracted to spicy wontons, so we had to order the Sichuan spicy wontons in red oil. I'm forever chasing the flavor of a similar dish I had years ago in a restaurant in Randallstown called Szechuan Best. There, the red oil was as aromatic as it was spicy. Red Pepper's rendition is very good, with nicely tender pork-filled wontons, but the sauce didn't have the kick that I was looking for. Still, it was pretty tasty and I'll order it again.

One of our two favorite Chinese restaurants is Grace Garden in Odenton, and one dish we always order there is the Sichuan pork belly, a dish of thinly sliced pork belly stir fried with chiles and leeks. We thought the Fried Salty and Dried Pork with Scallion at Red Pepper would be similar. It was, and it wasn't. When tasting the dish in the restaurant, I did notice that the pork was indeed salty, but it wasn't until I ate the leftovers at home three days later that I noticed the pork had also been smoked. Saltiness aside, the dish was quite nice, and as it was not spicy, somewhat of an antidote to the following dish.

We used to get a dish called "beef on toothpicks" at our other favorite Chinese restaurant, Hunan Taste (which appears to have closed permanently). Literally fried slivers of beef impaled on toothpicks, the meat was flavored with cumin and chiles. Red Pepper offers both beef and lamb with cumin. The dishes seemed similar enough despite the lack of pointed wooden implements, so we tried the latter. Baby, it was hot, but also redolent of the promised cumin. I can dig the heat of dried red chiles, which to me doesn't last as long on the palate as that of fresh green chiles, and is much easier for me to tolerate. However, Mr Minx found it a bit incendiary.

Another way to beat the heat of the lamb dish was to take bites of Shrimp with Rice Crusts. The menu describes the dish thusly: "When rice crust is combined with beef or pork, it tastes spicy. With shrimp or fish filet, amazingly, it changes to sweet and sour." The rice crusts - squares of crisply fried rice - are presented on their own in a large bowl, with the topping poured over at tableside.  Rather than some mysterious alchemical transformation, the shrimp and fish versions are simply presented in a somewhat brothy, lightly sweet and tangy sauce that is absolutely nothing like the ketchup-and-pineapple juice sweet-and-sour that Americans are used to (thank god). I imagine that the beef and pork versions have a spicy sauce, which we will have to try at another time.

The shrimp were plump and sweet, and there were a nice amount of vegetables. The rice crusts themselves have a nice roasty flavor, and I'd love to nibble them on their own. I am torn about their texture once deluged with sauce.

Finally, we tried the Stir-fry Green Beans, which I loved. The beans were still a little crisp, garlicky, and salty. Mr Minx likes them a little softer, and preferred the reheated beans a few days later. Still, a very good rendition of a favorite dish.

After this first visit to Red Pepper, we determined that we need to go back again, and often. The food was very good. Amazingly good for Towson. And while it might not be at the top of the heap for us just yet, we will put Red Pepper into our regular dining rotation and hope to taste most of the menu (might skip fish maw though) in the not too distant future.

Red Pepper Sichuan Bistro
11 Allegheny Avenue
Towson, MD 21204
http://www.redpeppermd.com

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Grace Garden

We've posted about Grace Garden many times here on Minxeats. It's also the answer I most often give to the question, "what is your favorite local restaurant?" Truthfully, my favorite restaurant changes from day to day, depending on where I've eaten most recently and what I  might be craving at the moment. But Grace Garden remains a favorite, and on days when it's not #1, it's definitely firmly in second place.

A hole in the wall in a strip mall in Odenton isn't always the first place one thinks of for a Chinese feast, but there it is.

We visited in September for my brother's birthday (an annual tradition) and the place was slammed. Thankfully we had made a reservation this year. (Last year we were yelled at for not doing so and urged to hurry though our meal so someone else could get our table. But as far as I can tell, they don't actually keep track of reservations.) There were still several tables available when we arrived, but the carry-out orders were stacking up. One group of three chicks ordered ten items. A father came in with his two noisy children. The kids didn't seem to want anything, so I imagine they'd be enjoying chicken fingers and microwave mac and cheese while Dad chowed down on fish noodles and XO chicken.

There are two dishes we order every time we visit Grace Garden, as the four of us, my picky father included, enjoy them: vermicelli with pork and pepper, and Sichuan pork belly. This occasion was no different. And despite having to wait nearly half an hour for our food (about 20 minutes longer than usual), and hearing the normally mild-mannered-seeming chef yelling in the kitchen (I could actually see him from my seat, and he seemed pissed at something or someone), there was no change in the quality or flavor of his food. Now that's consistency.

Sichuan pork belly with leeks, bell peppers, Sichuan bean paste

Vermicelli stir fried with ground pork and chiles

We also normally order the salt and pepper squid, big slabs of roughly chopped squid coated in a eggy-tasting batter, aggressively seasoned with salt and pepper and topped with fried shallots and slices of raw jalapeno. This dish did suffer a bit from the kitchen chaos; it tasted fine, but it was a bit oily.

Salt and pepper squid

We're always pleased to see new dishes added to the menu. A few years back, we ate some marvelous lamb chops served with lemongrass and scallions at a Chowhound Chinese New Year dinner and made a special request for them from time to time. The last time I called for them, I was told that it's too expensive to make, since they basically have to buy a case of the chops and then can't sell them. Instead, they used the same preparation on some pork ribs and put it on the regular menu. It's basically a variation of the salt and pepper squid, with a crispier batter and lots of deep fried lemongass bits. Yummy.

Pork spare ribs with lemongrass and fried scallions

Another new dish we tried is the house special chili pepper chicken. They do two versions, one a stir fry, the other with deep fried chicken. We chose the latter, which came to the table buried in a mountain of fried chile peppers and a big handful of stir fried Sichuan peppercorns. Pretty much everything on the Grace Garden menu is spicy, and to the newbie, probably incendiary. We don't notice so much anymore. But this dish was crazy spicy. Not so much hot--I didn't really get much impact from all those chiles, but the numbing quality of the Sichuan peppercorns was off the hook. Not really peppers, the dried berries of the prickly ash have an unusual floral flavor and might be off-putting to people not used to them. I normally don't mind them, but this dish was a little over the top. Just as I'd bite into a morsel of lovely fried chicken thigh, a peppercorn would assault my tongue. Eventually I grew tired of fighting and gave up.

Chili pepper chicken

No matter. There was plenty of other delicious items on the table to choose from.





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