Restaurant review: Cheng Du 23 in Wayne
December 31, 2010
By Elisa Ung, Restaurant Reviewer
Originally appeared in THE RECORD
If you’re looking for a rewarding food-related cultural experience, I generally wouldn’t point you toward a Chinese restaurant. Not because the food isn’t full of potential. But because too many Chinese restaurants make it difficult for diners to find non-Americanized food unless you know what you’re looking for or are ethnic Chinese; there may be one general English- language menu front-loaded with Chinese-American favorites while the really interesting stuff is only on the Chinese-language menu. I’ve spent a lot of time in Chinese restaurants wondering whether a bland dish has been dumbed down because I only spoke English – and whether it would taste any better if my Chinese grandmother were with me.
But now for the good news. It’s called Cheng Du 23, and it looks like a forgettable restaurant in a strip mall near Willowbrook Mall in Wayne. But what you’ll find past the bright peppers sign is some great Sichuan cooking, as well as a refreshing effort to make the restaurant inclusive.
There is one menu. It is in both Chinese and English. It mingles Americanized favorites with Sichuan dishes – that would be General Tso’s chicken marching right alongside tripe and sea cucumber. For the Sichuan dishes and house specials, it explains the major ingredients and whether they are spicy (the dominant characteristic of Sichuan food). It includes photographs of some dishes and even pictures of different kinds of tea leaves offered by the restaurant. It’s a little unwieldy and can be overwhelming to get through, but you’ll likely run across an unfamiliar dish you’d like to try.
And, everything is made the same way no matter who orders it, insists owner Kevin Lin, who bought the former Tai-Pei Noodle House in 2008 and reopened it as the Sichuan restaurant it is today (it is not related to Chengdu 1 in Cedar Grove or Chengdu 46 in Clifton). Lin sees educating his customers as good business: he wanted his restaurant to appeal to Chinese and non-Chinese customers, and also wanted English-speaking customers to know the Chinese names for foods (on the off chance they travel to China, he says). This has paid off in a clientele that’s about evenly split between ethnic Chinese and everyone else.
Lin’s chef and business partner, Jiang Yongyi, worked for eight years at the well-known Sichuan restaurant Dragon Palace in Edison before opening Cheng Du 23. Yongyi recently won a high-profile Chinese cooking competition in New York, the third annual NTDTV International Chinese Culinary Competition Banquet, and so on the day we arrived for one visit, a Chinese camera crew had just finished filming the restaurant.
The polite waiters speak some English and can answer basic questions, but the menu is really a better guide. We stuck to Sichuan dishes as well as what the menu describes as house specials. We were thrilled with two Sichuan benchmarks: long, light and zippy dan dan noodles ($5) and the thick, smoky and tender tea-smoked duck ($17). Lightly breaded morsels of three-pepper chicken get their heat from Sichuan peppercorns, fresh green peppers and dry chili; the result is pure heaven ($12). Seafood is also done well here: pan-fried flounder with a crunchy crust ($24) and grilled scallops in a light garlic sauce ($19).
If you can get past the unusual ingredients, you’d probably enjoy two other dishes – a cold dish of exceptionally tender, meaty ox tongue and thinly cut, equally tender tripe in a roasted peanut vinaigrette ($7, fans of nose-to-tail cooking, take note) and an enormous casserole dish filled with silky tofu and delicate slices of sea cucumber ($16).
The food wasn’t uniformly excellent – we were put off by mealy-skinned Sichuan dumplings with an unusually sweet sauce ($5, they are not made in-house) and lukewarm, limp tea-smoked bacon ($13). And it’s incidental in a place like this, but the bubble tea was terrible, filled with some tapioca balls that were hard and chewy and others so soft they were nearly disintegrating.
About that famous Sichuan heat. We found our dishes aggressively spicy, but it wasn’t overwhelming; we could still taste the ingredients of each dish. Experienced Sichuan eaters may like it a little hotter; the uninitiated may want them to turn it down. Lin says all heat requests will be accommodated, even if it takes a few trips back to the kitchen. So go ahead and branch out past the sweet and sour chicken – you might like what you find.