Jonathan Gold Discusses Chengdu Taste in Alhambra

Jonathan Gold checks into new Alhambra Sichuan addition Chengdu Taste and is impressed with the restaurant's vast, mouth-numbing menu:

If your experience of Sichuan food is mostly from the Chongqing-style places that have popped up in the San Gabriel Valley in the last few years, you will probably find this Chengdu-style cooking lighter, cleaner and less likely to wake you up in the middle of the night with chile-oil induced nightmares.

The spectacularly tender fish is numbing enough (you're not supposed to drink the broth), but the almost electric charge of the peppercorns brings out the flavor of the filets and the chiles — the taste flits around your lips and tongue with the weird vibrancy of a flashing Las Vegas sign — where the pepper sauce with the wonton obliterates everything in its path, like a mysteriously pleasurable punch in the mouth.

Wontons and boiled fish with green pepper sauce are a good place to start, and J.Gold also suggests the cumin lamb and diced rabbit with younger sister's secret recipe. [LAT]

B-Rod gives two stars to Goldie's "modern" veggie-centered cuisine: "Lim's aesthetic, particularly his way with vegetables, is hugely original. Ingredients are hardly ever employed for the textural and flavor purposes you've come to expect. They're often turned on their head — a cucumber as smoky warm base rather than snappy, cooling salad component: milk as a crunchy garnish. Very little of what you order at Goldie's comes to the table as you might expect it, and in this era of everyone-serves-the-same-goddamn-beet-salad, that is refreshing indeed." [LAW]

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Chengdu Taste

828 W Valley Rd Alhambra, CA 91803