Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant (Burnaby)

Imagine our surprise when we were driving along Kingsway a while ago and noticed that they opened up a Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant on the corner of Nelson and Kingsway.  A sister restaurant to the Szechuan Chongqing locations on Commercial Drive and the one on Robson Street, this particular location is rather tiny (serving as various bubble tea joints, chinese restaurants and a Brownie’s Fried Chicken in the past).

They’ve finally gotten rid of that large 3D bucket of chicken sign in the front (some of the previous tenants simply slapped on a new sign on the bucket but you always knew that it was a holdover from the Brownie’s Chicken days).  They’ve done a nice remodel to this place and the interior is a mix of cool greys with black accents with a limited amount of seating.

The last time we were at the Commercial Drive location we had a great shredded chicken dish so were happy to see that the menu items here were the same.  The Shredded Chicken with Red Pepper and Peanut Sauce is a cold appetizer dish and has the perfect amount of spiciness with a bit of crunchiness from the daikon pieces.

The Peking Duck is available in 1/2 orders with 5 crêpe wrappers.  The duck itself was pretty good (a little bit of fat on some pieces but that’s to be expected with duck meat) and had a nice crispy skin.  This is the perfect size for couples who may not want to order a big platter of peking duck (although I’m sure that we could probably finish off a full order pretty easily).

We also ordered the 1/2 size Duck Lettuce Wrap… pretty much as good as we’ve had anywhere else.  It was a little amusing… at first, they had seated us at a small table meant for two people and my first thought was that the table was a bit tiny.  Once they heard all of the food that we were ordering, they moved us over to a larger booth because they said “oh, your table is too small for all of the food.”  For some reason, waiters are always surprised at the amount of food that we order.

We needed some veggies so we decided to stick with a tried-and-true favourite – Fried Green Beans Szechuan Style.  This had a nice amount of heat without being overly spicy.

And to finish off our meal, we ordered 1/2 an order of the Sweet and Sour Sliced Fish.  The fish is breaded and deep fried and tossed in a sweet and sour sauce with julienned veggies and pineapple chunks.

The service was very attentive with one of the servers coming by frequently to top up our tea.  Speaking of tea, it had a nice, mellow taste to it with hints of what we thought was lychee (but we’re not really sure).

I think we’ve found ourselves a new favourite restaurant.  The thing that really sealed the deal for us was that they were playing a bunch of old 80’s music in the background including classics like “I Like Chopin” by Gazebo and a bunch of others that you would probably only remember if you were an Asian teen in the 80’s.

Here’s a video that I found on YouTube for “I Like Chopin” – don’t you just miss these 80’s music videos?

Food:  5 / 5
Service:  4.5 / 5

4909 Kingsway
Burnaby, BC

www.cqrestaurant.com

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