Red Chilli Szechwan Cuisine - Redlands

Szechwan (Szechuan or Sichuan) cuisine is a style of Chinese cooking from the Sichuan province in southwestern China. It is known for liberal use of garlic and chili peppers which make it spicy and pungent. We ate at a Szechwan restaurant in Beijing, China years ago and it seriously about put me under, heat-wise. I learned that day that Rachael could seriously out-do me on a heat scale. She kept eating when I had to give up because of heat overload.  

People at work were talking about Red Chilli Szechwan Cuisine and one told me I'd recommended it to her. No, I responded, I'd never heard of it. So I decided I needed to get right on over there. The name was enough to get me there.

Red Chilli has a very large menu. One side is normal Chinese the other is largely Szechwan food with little red chilies off to the side to indicate heat. The menu itself raised it in my estimation. Look at some of these dishes: dried pot frog, extra spicy; dried pot intestine; mini hot pot with pork blood, pork intestine strips and vegetable; deep fried pork intestines with hot pepper; stir fried pork intestines with pickled chili; stir fried pork with green jalapeno; boiled intestines in chili sauce; etc. I love menus that do not water down to the lowest common denominator of American taste buds. However, my issue with it is that most of the items must be frozen to accommodate such a large menu and the result is a mixture of  combinations from multiple plastic bags. My experience is mixed so far.

I'm looking at an on-line menu so some of these identifications may not be spot-on. I believe this first dish is deep fried fish with pepper and cumin, noted as extra spicy. The fish was pretty good, but I could not get over the feeling that I was eating a version of frozen fish sticks. It was loaded with lots of chilies and bamboo shoots, I believe. I actually did add the red oil chili sauce to it they had on the side and the top of my head was sweating. I ate about half and took the rest to work to share with the person who suggested it to me. She later told me it was way too hot for her.

Fried fish

The next dish is lamb with green onion. I love lamb and I love green onion. It also came with some red onion. It had an interesting add-in flavor that I can't identify which detracted from the dish a little for me.

Lamb

I'm not sure of this next dish, but I think it was either deep fried spare ribs with salt pepper or deep fried pork chop. It was my biggest disappointment. It was cut into chunks of deep fried gristly pork that were difficult to eat and didn't taste all that great so there was no incentive to try.

Deep fried pork chop.

I can't find the next dish on the menu which was pork belly with tofu and green onion. It was sort of sweet and the pork belly was quite good, more than I can say for pork belly we had in restaurants on a recent trip to the Midwest. But the tofu was in big chunks and I'm just not a tofu person. Sans the tofu, this was the best dish I've had there.

Pork belly and tofu

Next was spicy chicken wings which came with a nice helping of sliced red and green jalapeno, as well as the long thin red chilies. The wings were crispy on the outside but still very moist on the inside. I liked the wings quite a bit.

Chicken wings

I'm going to go back and try some more dishes. So far I've not found anything that is going to pull me in as a regular, but I've had some intriguing dishes that are going to keep me exploring.