Yummy Szechuan — Restaurant in Millbrae

This place has recently taken the heavyweight title of BEST Sichuan cuisine in the Bay Area and is now my favorite Chinese restaurant followed by Hunan Impression in San Jose and Royal Feast in Millbrae. The front of house speak canton, but I think the cook may be from Sichuan. I had been going to Sichuan Cuisine out in the Sunset district in SF since I live in the city but I now make the drive to Millbrae just for this place. The food is incredibly flavorful - you get that intense smoked wok flavor clinging to most dishes. Also, I believe that this restaurant uses higher quality ingredients than most other restaurants, which would explain why their Dan Dan Mein is actually tasty (the noodles they use are on point and appear to be marinated, the peanuts have been pre-smoked before making the sauce, etc.) as opposed to the drab, dull noodles sloshed around in cheap peanut oil that most restaurants serve. The eggplant dishes and Lotus root dishes here are all out of sight - if you want lotus root done right, this is the place.

Eggplant with thousand year egg is to die for. Excellent.

If I ask this place to make my food spicy...and I always do, the food is so @#$@ing SPICY that I joyfully suffer for days afterward (fellow white folk: as long as you order ahead and write in Chinese, they will make it spicy...it's true, getting spicy food as a white person in authentic Chinese restaurants still proves to be a difficult endeavor, even when I plead with them in Mandarin to add spice...it only works if I order ahead on a faceless app). What can I say - eating this food is akin to some sort of painfully therapeutic massage complete with whimpering and long bouts of sobbing....but purely tears of joy and delight, friends. They use a good balance of szechuan peppercorn to dehydrated red pepper - good balance of numbing spice and an undercurrent of potent pepper spice.

The only dish here that is mediocre is the beef chow mein...it's just ok, but that may be by power of comparison to the other delicious dishes that I've eaten it alongside. Lotus root, eggplant, frog, chicken hooves, chong ching chicken, pig ear...you can't go wrong with any of it. I continue to order new things and am blown away each time. The chef at this restaurant is an artist who takes his/her craft seriously and one of the best in the entire Bay Area...

Awesome Sichuan food . We tried the spicy boiling fish, Chongqing spicy chicken and Dan Dan mien. Fish and chicken were awesome. Dan Dan mien was good.

Edit on February 15 2019: reducing two stars from my initial 5 stars review. I took my wife here for our Valentine's day dinner as we both loved this place the first time we were here.

We added our names to the waiting list. There were two huge tables free, but they didn't seat us there. We thought they were reserving it for a bigger group. So we were waiting patiently for our turn to be seated. Two Chinese people arrived after we had been waiting for 40 minutes, and added their names to the waiting list after us. A table just got ready and the waiters seated them instead of us.

We were shocked and when we asked the waiters , they spoke with the newly arrived Chinese people in Mandarin, gave us that table and seated them both in the big table that had been empty the whole duration we had been waiting there.

We don't have any complaints about the food. It is still the best Sichuan food we have had in the bay. We are upset that we got treated like this, especially after driving from San Jose to Millbrae on our...

I rarely write reviews for Chinese restaurants because for the most part I find them mediocre. My mom taught English in China and as a result raised me to know what good Chinese food really is (lord knows you will never find me at panda express). This restaurant is truly exceptional. I have dreams about the dried green beans with chilis. All of their house specials are flavorful and addictive. We live in Monterey and anytime we are anywhere near San Fran I beg my husband to drive out of our way so we can eat here. I always order a mountain of food so I can have days of glorious leftovers. The staff consistently go out of their way to make sure we are happy customers. I could go on and on, but seriously, you are missing out if you are not...