Chengdu Taste

Up for a challenge? Then come to Chengdu!
This place serves spicy, Szechuan food. Imagine numbing peppercorn, thai chili, serrano and jalapeño, and chili oil. Now image fish filet and bean sprouts. Now. put them all together and you have their boiled fresh fish with green peppers. But imagine the peppercorn numbing your mouth. Throw in chili oil and green peppers and you’re mouth is ablaze. Don’t let this scare you though, Chengdu is soooo delicious. Just make sure you drink lots of water.
Here is a list of what I recommend ordering:
— boiled fresh fish in green pepper; this is soooo good, but so spicy. Watch out for this
— mung bean jelly noodles; this is one of my all time favorites. It’s so fun to eat. Think «jello noodles»
— toothpick lamb; this is a MUST. Cooked in cumin and so good. Consider ordering one to-​go as this goes great with beer
— Szechuan chili wonton; this is okay, but definitely a must when having Szechuan
— Dan dan mien; so good, so spicy with whole peanuts.
— A choy (which is basically chinese lettuce); self explanatory. But don’t let this simple dish fool you, it’s quite good.
— frog with red and green pepper; this dish is amazing. Watch out for small bones though!

yet another mediocre sichuan food restaurant.
boiled fish in hot sauce, for example, should never be cooked that way.
the quality of the stuffing for its dumplings was horrible.
little to zero service.

Love Love Love this place. Need to get there early as this place is not very big. The lionfish, crispy chicken and secret shrimp is a must. It will leave your mouth burning, but so worth it. I did not have any issues with service.

I’m going to have to try several more dishes here before arriving at a fully informed take on it, a few of the ones that I tried were so hot that it’s hard to really have much of a gauge on it all. The wonton with red chili sauce is absolutely excellent — it’s hot, but not unreasonably so. A perfect entry point for a restaurant like this. The mung bean jelly noodle with chili sauce is another spicy but delicious dish. It’s a notch up on the heat scale but isn’t anything that you can’t handle, and certainly isn’t as hot as it looks. The boiled fresh fish with green pepper sauce is the real dragon slayer here — so unbelievably hot that it takes away from the enjoyment of the dish. Your face numbs, your ears practically ring. This was the one that was too much for me.
Despite the heat, overall it’s wonderful to have a really challenging restaurant like this in the area (or at least challenging to an inexperienced white guy like me, haha). I look forward to many future visits.

Good food is always equal bad service ?
The taste is getting down and service is so bad.
If their don’t like customer get reward then just post no more reward program not just said the machine is broken, you have to figure out how to help customer to get reward. The reward program is provide from store, not any customer ask you set up reward. be willing to help customers okay
Waiters!

Wow. Best restaurant in San Gabriel for Szechuan. Seriously no joke. One of those few times Jonathan Gold was spot on.
Lion fish was incredibly fresh. It takes a bit of time to prepare but the wait is well worth it. It reminds me a lot of fish and chips without the chips and a nice gingery sweet sauce to dip your «fish fries» in. Lovely fishy. It’s a large fish. Do not be deceived by the photos.
Toothpick lamb was the winner of the evening. Everyone loved it. I don’t like cumin but I love it here. It’s a perfect spice balance with the cumin. Very savory too. It’s hard to stop eating
Ice powder dessert doesn’t look pretty like some of the Unilocal photos but it is refreshing like a cool jello.
Tan tan noodles were very good. Excellent spices and just the right amount of spice. It came out piping hot.
Beef jerky had a really great spice flavor but too much oil. It’s a cold dish but I really wish it was warm. Skip this one.

This is the most a noxious restaurant. Rude people with no sense of service. I would
Not even go there again. They refused to serve at 8 pm when they had at least 15 people who were eating there. They said kitchen is closed– at 8 pm. Unbelievable! They should be shut down.

The manager Cici helped settle my big group well! The good was great, and even though I messed up on an order, Cici just gave me a free dish!
Thanks !

The type of service here is despicable. It’s only proper business to seat patrons in an orderly manner of first come, first serve. Part of dining out is about the experience and quite frankly, Chengdu Taste does not care about that.
After 20 minutes of waiting, my party and I were brushed to the side so that another party (who came after us and waited no more than 2 minutes) were immediately seated.
We were given used To-​Go paper menus with food stains while the table next to us were given proper Dine-​In laminated menus with colored pictures. You’re telling me you only have 5 menus for the whole restaurant when your restaurant holds ~12 tables?! Very good excuse Chengdu
Terrible service! Do not come here!

The Szechuan food at Chengdu Taste is okay as always. The portions are large and the prices are reasonable. This location has plenty of parking and not a huge crowd.
The problem with Chengdu Taste is the service. No, I’m not talking about typical service level here. The service at Chengdu Taste has been especially bad. There are so many good Szechuan restaurants now so I will be skipping this place.
First of all, we were made to wait for 20 minutes when there were clean empty tables. There were also several tables that had no customers and hadn’t been cleaned the entire time. I tried to ask for a table when I walked in since there were tables and the guy was so rude and attitudy telling me to sign in on the waiting list.
The bad service continued throughout the night. We had to ask for things several times and it was hard to get their attention. Even when they walk by and we flag them down, they see us and then just kept walking. We couldn’t get our water refilled for over 10 minutes.
With this level of service, it’s no wonder that they don’t have that many customers even on a weekend.

I really like spicy food, so my review may be skewed. If you’re not into spicy or can’t handle heat, then I’d maybe avoid this place.
I’ve been here a few times and my favs so far are:
The toothpick lamb (they have toothpick lab on their menu, but don’t worry, it’s not toothpick dog) — delicious chunky cubes of lamb, a must try
Boiled fish soup — has numbing pepper corns in it and really tasty fish
String beans — fairly simple, but a good amount of spice and nice to add some greens to your meal ;)
Eggplant — not that spicy and good flavors
The restaurant isn’t too large and can get busy around noon, so might be best to come a bit early

What surprised me about Chengdu Taste is how different the food was from other Szechuan dishes I had before. My family came for dinner and shared:
This big pork shank covered with a fiery red sauce. You carve off big hunks of pork and while the pork is not spicy, the sauce is! An appetizer was a really freshly poached chicken, swimming in a bath of green chili sauce. The sauce resembles a kind of tomatillo salsa, and the flavors seem herbal and aromatic, mostly of lemongrass and a mild chili but the ma la creeps up and hits you in the back of the throat. As usual, we like to balance spicy with non spicy so the tofu and fish hot pot was a nice choice with generic swai and extra soft tofu and sauteed vegetables with garlic. We rounded out the meal with a cumin-​spiked classic, the toothpick lamb.

This restaurant is BOMB!!! I saw online that the Alhambra one was closed for a few days due to cockroaches. Gross!
We ordered the mung bean jelly noodles (appetizer). Holy moly this dish was soooo good! It is an absolute must order. We also got the boiled fish in hot and spicy sauce. Another must order. The last dish that we got was the chicken and hot peppers. Do not order this dish! The chicken was fatty and since it was attached to the bone, it was difficult to eat. We should have ordered the spicy fried boneless chicken instead!
I can’t wait to go back to try the lion fish (off menu item — it’s fried tilapia with sweet and sour sauce. This dish is one of their specialties), the eggplant, dan dan noodles, and the spicy fried boneless chicken.

Our main tax auditor contact at work was leaving for greener pastures, so we wanted to take her out to lunch during her last week at our offices. The place we would eat at would be her choice, and she suggested Chengdu Taste, which recently opened in the new plaza right by McDonald’s. Apparently, they also have an older location in Alhambra.
We arrived around 12 pm and the place was already half full (or half empty for those pessimists?). After some undecisiveness, we settled on the following orders:
* Mung bean jelly noodles (appetizer) — Excellent choice to start off the meal. The spices are all at the bottom, so either mixed it up well if everyone can handle the spiciness, or have those who want a milder taste take the top portions first.
* Sweet and sour cabbage (I think that was what it was called). It is pretty much just cabbage only, but the sweet and sour taste provided a very nice contrast to all the other spicy dishes we ordered. Goes great with rice.
* Toothpick beef — Flavorful with a slight kick of spice! Love it. There’s also a lamb version (I and the tax auditor did not eat lamb so we ordered the beef version).
* Chengdu fried rice — We asked for this to be less spicy, so this was the dish that was the least spiciest of all! Super good.
* Kung pao shrimp — A lot of peanuts is what I remember the most. Shrimp tasted fresh.
* Volcanic squid — OMG, super spicy and drenched in oil! They use 4 hot stones to keep this dish hot (temperature wise), so be on the lookout for them when you are getting a serving.
Be aware that if you want white rice, it’s $ 1 per person. Once we saw that on the bill, we asked for a box to take the leftover white rice home (which was a 5-​person portion as only one person ate white rice since we also had a fried rice dish). At least the tea was no charge!

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Chengdu Taste, but the stories about the 2 hour waits were not encouraging. We got lucky though because the Rosemead location will take your name via phone and you can shorten your wait by a TON! We called an hour ahead and put our name down, we got there right about an hour later and were seated within 5 minutes, yay!
FOOD:
— mung bean jelly noodles — comes out quick and is very refreshing. The jelly noodles are yummy, mix well with the spiciness underneath, super slurpable
— dan dan mien — this was my favorite dish we ordered! Not too spicy, but super flavorful, creamy and peanutty
— eggplant — I love eggplant and the flavor on this is delicious! But its suuuuper oily, so use some rice to soak it up!
— mabo tofu — I wasn’t a huge fan of the flavor on this. The tofu was great and silky, but they grind up sichuan peppercorns and put it on top. Makes it more spicy, which is great, but the peppercorns have a fennel-​y taste, which I didn’t like
— boiled fish with green pepper — more peppercorns and fennel-​y taste in this dish too. The fish texture is silky and tender and the broth is pretty tasty, I just avoided the peppercorns: P
SERVICE:
Slow, lol. All the servers are quite relaxed, no one is rushing. You have to flag someone down for anything you might need. The diners are also very slow and relaxed, since its not something you can eat quickly, so turnover is slow.
VENUE/​PARKING:
Each table is pretty spacious and you don’t feel crowded. Décor is modern and bathrooms are clean. The space could probably fit tables more efficiently, but oh well. Located in a plaza, parking was easy enough to find.
I would come back, but I think I would order a mixture of spicy and non-​spicy dishes. I love spicy, but eating sooo much spicy made my tummy feel funny AND some of the dishes had sooooo much oil in them. And now I know that sichuan peppercorns taste like fennel and I’m not a fan of that! :P

So chengdu taste is in the McDonald’s and Sam woo plaza on Valley blvd. The parking lot is HORRIBLE! It’s so small compared to the amount of people that go in that plaza. If you go during dinner time it’s really hard to find parking. Every time I come here, it’s always been packed for dinner. when I drive by this plaza, I always see people outside waiting to eat at this place. So yes, you must try this place at least once if you’re debating it.
I always get their mung bean jelly, I love he texture of it. It’s easy to slurp and it literally is like jelly but in noodle form. I get this at a lot of Sichuan restaurants and the two places I like it the most are here and spicy city.
Another dish I like is their mapo tofu, I always ask for it with no meat and extra spicy. Trust me, it’s extremely spicyyyy… I’m always sweating bullets, my tongue gets numb, my stomach starts to gurgle, and I’m constantly blowing my nose.
Another dish that I love is their vegetable hotpot. It has lotus root, cauliflower, bamboo shooter, bean sprouts, vermicelli noodles, potato and woodear mushroom. It’s a huge portion and since it’s so spicy I can’t eat too much of it. But it’s so delicious and it’s already making my mouth water as I’m typing this.
I’m only giving this place 4 stars because of their parking, their service isn’t the best (waiters who don’t speak much English), and worst of all… Their food takes a long time to come out! On days when they’re super busy, they take even longer. Food is yummy, everything else is blehh!

It’s so sad because the food wasn’t bad. But the service was just so terrible that I can’t return nor would I give it anything but a one star review.
Horrible service. What happened, you ask? We arrive at the restaurant, get seating immediately, and after a quick 5 minute perusal of the menu — we’re ready to order. Except the three to four staff members are so busy talking to each other behind the counter. Also, the wait staff never smiled. Ye gawds, you do know you’re not a model and smiling is allowed, ya?
We weren’t the only table with that treatment. Other tables had to stand up to get the attention of the wait staff. Regardless the wait staff was, they decided they never want to make eye contact and you’re frantically waving your hands (like you just don’t care — teehee) for extra tea, your missing dish, or the check — heck the check where there’s money and waiting for change. Everything needed to a wave for attention. No one decides — hey, I dropped off the bill, maybe I should check if it’s ready after a few minutes. Oh no. And god forbid you try to come by and ask if there’s anything else we need or how’s the food tasting.
Anyways onto the food and what we ordered:
Toothpick lamb (or lab on the menu) with cumin — OH this was so delicious. Perfectly seasoned, spicy, bite sized goodness. This would be the definite highlight of our meal.
Steamed flour pork — least favorite. It’s pork in the middle with fat on the outside. It was lukewarm. It was just blech!
Beef gravy rice — standard, perfect non-​spicy dish to go with our other dishes.
Sauteed String bean — spicy and seasoned well, great kick with each bite of string bean.
Mungbean Cold Noodles — The spicy/​vinegar tasting sauce was super nom nom nom. Except that it was the last thing that arrived. UM, isn’t this already made and you just bring it to our table? We had to ask at least twice before it was the last thing that arrived at our table.
Shame on you Chengdu Taste and your poorly trained staff. If I come back, it’s shame on me. It’s possible that I would try the other location in the SGV, but this one is definitely a no-​go.
Shares a lot with a McDonalds on the corner of Walnut Grove and Valley with ample parking.

Ohhhh… It Hurts Sooo Good
Are you lactose intolerant but sometimes want to feel naughty and take a sip of whole milk? Or allergic to shell fish but love a good bag of crawfish the whole shabang at Boiling Crab? Or allergic to water so you don’t shower? Ha! That last one was a trap! No one is allergic to water! Got you good didn’t I. Go take a shower you smelly bastard.
Back to my point, the food is so damn hot but so damn tasty that you keep stuffing your face of all its goodness. Every bite I was thinking,” This isn’t going to feel as great going out as it is going into my body.” :(
It went into my body a couple hours ago, come back for the update in a few hours to find out the dramatic director’s cut ending.
You’ve failed at life if you go here and don’t get the Flavored Chicken With Chili Sauce (generic name… I know… typical chinese menu)

I recently when back second time in 滋味成都 (Chengdu Taste) in the Rosemead Location during new year eve, yes the last meal of 2014! W
What I like this one is closer to my home and I could make the reservation ahead with some connection. This place is almost as packed as the one in Alhambra. Chengdu Taste is been featured as one of top Chinese Restaurant in L.A. T
Keep it short, the food here is better than the first time. Quality has improve, except the lamb skewers. That one isn’t as tasty as I remember. However, the boiled fish was the bomb and easily the best I ever had.
Didn’t order the lion fish this time, this is one time thing and is overpriced for what it is. Great for Instagram and facebook picture but not something I would everytime.
Their appertizer bean jelly noodle is delicious and is highly recommend. Not all their dish are spicy, but if you don’t eat spicy. Why you wanna come here haha The service could still need to improve, from what I hear they gonna open another one soon in Rowland Height.

Totally lives up to the hype! I get it now why ppl wait hours for this place. So freakin good!
Pro tip — Have a buddy, who has a lot of free time, come early and put down your name. Wait time will be close to an hour at dinner rush.
Stand outs for me were mung been jelly noodle, and the lamb sticks. Also unexpectedly delicious was the fried rice. Dishes were very authentic to the street food taste I remember in China.
Not all Sichuan spiciness taste the same — it has many variations on taste, with its use of vinegar and sauces. I thought the dishes we ordered were a great representation of those different flavors.
Omelette dish was a nice break from all the spiciness. But I could have done without the beef dish with hot stones on the bottom… It was too salty for me. Also, we completely over ordered. Easy to do when price point is so good.
I will absolutely return. I’m already craving for the mung bean noodles!