Whether it's hot pot or regional Chinese dishes, dining family style is the way to go at this West Allis restaurant.
What a mesmerizing dish, this pot of Fei Teng fish on the table at Sze Chuan in West Allis: snow-white fillets bobbing in a sea of red — chile oil dotted with Sichuan peppercorns and thick with brick-red dried chiles.
It's a dish that makes you want more, but pace yourself; Sze Chuan has a big menu that includes hot pot, essentially a buffet at your table.
Luo Shungui and Sun Yin opened Sze Chuan in December in a little strip mall on National Ave. west of Highway 100. The plaza is home to several Asian businesses, including a Chinese barbecue and bakery, a grocery store and a home-goods store, and in a freestanding building is Pho Cali, the second location of the Vietnamese restaurant on S. 27th St.
Sze Chuan is tucked into one of the larger plaza storefronts, where it has booths for four and tables that can accommodate big groups, and where the soundtrack is likely to be Chinese singers covering Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton songs.
The restaurant's menu is expansive, filled with Sichuanese and other regional Chinese dishes, plus a number of Chinese-American dishes. And it's been busy with customers, on Sundays especially.
And on many of the tables, you're likely to see hot pots; a couple of the larger round tables even have a glass lazy Susan to make the communal meal easier.
It's getting easier to find hot pot around Milwaukee, and it's certainly easy to understand its appeal. For a set price ($23.95 at Sze Chuan, discounted for seniors and children), a buffet basically is brought to diners, who cook the ingredients by dunking them in boiling broth, spicy or not, set over a portable burner.
Eat as much as you want, but leftovers are discouraged; waste too much, and there's an extra charge. It's a system that encourages gluttony, but a diner can feel virtuous eating everything from vegetables to meats to seafood cooked simply in broth.
Tick off whatever you want for the hot pot on a paper menu, and it will appear: paper-thin slices of lamb and beef, rolled and stacked; house-made fish balls and shrimp with the heads on; several kinds of mushrooms, young bamboo shoots, potato, lotus root. The list goes on, some three dozen kinds of tidbits. Customers often sit for more than an hour, talking and cooking and eating, talking and cooking and eating some more.
Such a pleasant way to have dinner and pass the time. But consider the rest of the menu. The traditional dishes are also best eaten family-style: a hot or cold appetizer or two, a fish dish, a meat dish, some vegetables.
A good start is wood-ear mushroom salad ($5.95). Sesame seeds and fresh cilantro brighten it, but the flavor almost is the least of it; the texture, a rubbery crunch, lands the dish squarely in the category of Food That's Fun to Eat.
Hotheads who want a spicier appetizer that still has a bouncy texture could order thick-cut cold noodles ($6.95) or ox tendon and maw ($6.95), each in chile sauce.
A hot appetizer, scallion pancake ($5.95), is particularly light and crisp at Sze Chuan, not weighed down with oil, and that lets the pancake's layers stand out.
The menu points diners to spicy Sichuan dishes, like that Fei Teng fish ($23.95), or pork kidney cut into elaborately scored slices with plenty of peppercorns ($13.95). A few mild dishes are tucked among them, like the incredible steamed eggs ($8.95), a flan-like cake that's like the lightest custard, topped with either bean sprouts or ground beef .
There are a dizzying number of meaty dishes, too, such as grilled lamb scented with cumin and dotted with chile flakes and seeds ($14.95). A well-rounded meal calls for vegetables, like the thin-sliced potato sticks, quickly stir-fried so they're still crunchy, and seasoned with vinegar ($8.95), or stir-fried Shanghai greens ($8.95), long-stemmed, verdant choy sum.
When the hot pot seemed like too much food but something bubbling and comforting was in order, we turned instead to the stone pots: ferociously bubbling spicy broth in a don't-dare-touch stone bowl, stocked with a choice of meats, like tender chicken slices with mushrooms ($13.95). It's both dinner and a show.