I went back to the Central Square branch with a crew of spice heads. I put these notes on my annotated Google map:
The “old time favorite” menu is fairly simple - eight sauces or bases (black bean sauce or 豆汁; broccoli or 蘭花; cashew nuts or 腰果; mixed vegetables or 雜菜; curry or 咖哩; garlic sauce or 魚香; scallion or 蔥爆; kung pao or 宮保) and four proteins (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp). They also have an extensive specialties menu which encompasses SiChuan, ShangHai, and TaiWan cooking. They are most successful with the SiChuanese dishes, delivering nuanced, layered flavor in red oil dumplings (紅油抄手 with a spicy sauce tinged with garlic blanched to perfection), dan dan noodles (擔擔麵 with a spicy, beautifully sesame-inflected sauce), dry pot (乾鍋 with layers of smoky complexity to a variety of protein options), and “boiled” (水煮 in a tongue-tingling broth of chili and SiChuan peppercorns). The dry fried green beans (乾扁四季豆) have a lovely pickle/garlic/scallion sauce. They use good cuts of meat with high quality knife work.
There are more things that I look forward to trying. And they have a hot pot (火鍋) option, where you pick out your raw ingredients from a chilled case, and they will mix a hot pot or dry pot for you. (The name of the restaurant in Chinese references the five flavors - 五味 - that are commonly blended as a single condiment and seven ingredients - 七品 - which appear to be seven hot pot soup bases.)
The disappointments come in the non-SiChuan offerings; dumplings (水餃) and pan fried pork buns (生煎包) are executed much better in other places, and lo mein (撈麵) and chow fun (河粉) are competent, but wouldn’t make you reconfigure your driving route.
Still, for the rich variety of spice head offerings, this is a legitimate addition to the plethora of SiChuan options in greater Boston.
