Chuan Tian Xia in Rockville - Report

An intrepid team of eight people gathered together to try this Maryland outpost of a Sichuan restaurant from Brooklyn which has made Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list. It is the new kid on the block with a pedigree.

We didn’t need much of a strategy to tackle this menu of very high prices that went along with some very large servings. A couple might have a harder time deciding. The result was an order of five dishes that made the cost reasonable with more than enough food.

This was an excellent meal by any standards. We had:

Paper Wrapped Fish served with a pickled pepper sauce.
Sour Soup with fat beef slices
Griddled Cauliflower
Chonqing Chicken
Fragrant Thousand Page Tofu

All dishes had gorgeous flavor. All winners.

We were served a BIG striped bass that came with a fairly light sauce and sliced potato, bean sprouts, and cabbage. The texture of the fish was an A+.

The soup came in the largest serving bowl I’ve ever seen. I didn’t realize they made them that big. This was the one thing we didn’t / couldn’t finish. It was both very salty and very delicious. Like the fish, not so sour as the name implies. The beef was sliced very thin (think bulgogi) and had a good deal of bean sprouts as well. All vegetable here are cooked just enough so the freshness shines through.

Griddled caulifower and the tofu were served in woks with a burner underneath. Both exceptional. The tofu dish featured firm tofu cut in medium slices. The caulifower had crispy burnt edges to it. I am guessing that happened before the thick slices got tossed in the wok.

And finally the Chongqing Chicken was true to its origin, heavily ma la, dry fried, with a load of dried red peppers. Instead of the chicken coming on the bone in small pieces, these tiny bits of chicken were boneless, but deep fried to a crackle.

I will go back!

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Good stuff. We frequent the Brooklyn location. Love it, but its not super consistent. We actually prefer the Kung Pao chicken over Chongqing here. The latter chicken is diced too small for our liking, but we enjoyed it everywhere else. The cauliflower and string beans are usual musts. So is the dry fish filets, but last time they were overbattered. Mapo Tofu is good too. I like the cold jelly noodles, but problem is I’m the only one who likes it. We normally order grilled fish elsewhere in the area, so not so much here. But I may try the paper wrapped one next

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For me, the small dice of the chicken makes up for the fact that it’s boneless, though I prefer on the bone. Makes it as much a sport as it is food.

Will try the cold jelly noodles next time. It’s a good thing to order in a group. Safety in numbers. That way, no single person’s commitment is all that much.

We may have been the only people in there at lunch.

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Steve, what was the heat level like?

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We only had one dish that was spicy at all, the chongqing chicken. None of the other dishes were supposed to be spicy, and they weren’t.

The chicken was very spicy, and it got gobbled up easily.

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Jealousy rears its ugly head! I left NoVA to come home to Montana and I am going to be missing restaurants like this!
I have had so many so-so versions of striped bass, I would like to enjoy one where it is prepared as well as this one! The sour soup and the Chonquing Chicken sound excellent as well!

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Uh Oh, you make it sound like a permanent move… I know another DC Chowhound who moved to Montana, BTW.

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A quick update on a couple of meals at Chuan Tian Xia since this excellent meal. Both meals were with only two people, so not nearly as much variety.

In October 2023, my wife and I ate there and had the sour soup with fat beef slices, potato floss (very lightly stir-fried shredded potato), and xiao long bao (soup dumplings). This was an excellent meal all the way around, all three dishes were very solid, especially the potato floss, which was crunchy and quite spicy with lots of peppers mixed in. It made us both wish we were with a group so that we try a lot more dishes, including some off the intriguing specials board.

Notably, this was a much better meal than we had had the prior month at the original of Chuan Tian Xia in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with a group of about eight people from the New York Hungry Onion board.




My report is not as good for the meal that I had at Chuan Tian Xia this past Monday, with a close friend who has a strong aversion to any unfamiliar foods (he chose the restaurant).

The whole vibe of the place felt different. There was no specials board and the menu had been revamped since our last visit. It still had a lof of variety (including the sour soup with fat beef slices), but it has an extensive Chinese-American section that I don’t remember from before. And the place was dead. We had a leisurely lunch, almost two hours, starting around 1:30 pm, and there was literally not one single other customer there the whole time we were there (but it’s not been crowded the other times I’ve been there either).

My friend ordered kung pao shrimp off the American menu; they brought kung pao chicken. I had a bite, it was bland even by Chinese-American standards, with no spice and (obviously) no Chinese peppercorns.

I ordered the potato floss and the Chongqing chicken, both of which had been excellent on my prior visits. My guard should have gone up when the waiter insisted that I order the boneless version of the chicken, even though I said I strongly preferred the bone-in version.

I only had two dishes, so this is a very limited sample size, but both were major disappointments. The potato floss had essentially no spice. Just comparing the photo of the potato floss from my most recent meal to the version of last year makes clear that I was served, without my asking for it, the dumbed-down American version of the dish. Last year, the dish was laced with a lot of pepper slivers; this year it has literally one slice of pepper. It was not bad, but not the delight it should have been.

The Chongqing chicken wasn’t much better. It looked okay (if a little over-fried), with a fairly big mound of chilis on top. But those turned out to be mostly decorative, and the dish was badly underpowered, with very little spice and very little “ma” flavor. And it was definitely over-fried.

When the check arrived, it confirmed my suspicion that I had been stereotyped and given dumbed down versions of the food, without even checking with me first. Rather than the “spicy potato floss” listed on the menu, I was given “mixed potato floss.” More important, the receipt specified that my Chongqing chicken was with “less ma” and “mild.” Not what I wanted at all.

I absolutely hate it when restaurants stereotype me.

As I said, this is only two dishes, so only two data points, but this was a weak meal.

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Arrgh! Seems like the vital ingredient missing was the dreaded “Under New Management” sign.

Maybe with your friend ordering from the Chinese-American side, they took that as a direction…

You No Like Syndrome rears it’s ugly head.

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I tried as hard as I could to make clear that he and I did not have the same tastes, even to the extent of asking for separate checks since my order would be a lot more because it was not from the $8.99 Chinese-American lunch special menu (complete with a hard-fried eggroll).

I do wonder if they are under new management. They didn’t gut the menu, however, even the extensive listing of bullfrog items is still on the menu.

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I have the same issue getting food spicy fairly frequently. Both here in the US and abroad. Hong Kong Palace at 7 Corners used to give me mild food until I asked for it to be spicier. Then the chef lit me up like a firecracker with their Cumin Lamb. I think I just look like I would not handle spicy food well.
Steve’s “You no like” comment about wait staff trying to judge your spice capability makes a lot of sense.
I spent more than a week getting my spice level right on Bo Phut Beach way back in the day. The lady vendor sold som tam and skewered chicken legs and that som tam got be be just about right for me with around 5 or 6 mouse shit chilis in a small dish of som tam. After a week or two of great som tam, I asked her how she liked her som tam and she whipped out a handful of chilis, must have been 20 or 25 of them, and went to town with the mortar and pestle and squatted down next to me and munched down a small serving of som tam.
If I had eaten that dish I would have spontaneously combusted.
And I like spicy food.

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Nowadays, even the spiciest Thai restaurants in DC are nowhere near the spice level that Thai restaurants had when they first starting coming to the US in significant numbers. There are supposed to be Thai restaurants in NYC (Somtum Der, for example) that are supposed to have authentic spice levels, but I haven’t eaten at them.

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I think you are right about that.
But in their defense, i imagine for every one of us that really do like it spicy and will not return to a consistently bland cafe, there are probably five or six who will blame the waiter/chef/cafe when they get a properly spiced dish and it is too spicy for them.
Being a good waiter may not be as difficult as being a good chef, but it might be close.
Good food is hard.

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This is so true.
There was a little Thai Restaurant in Bethesda around 1984. I ordered a dish that was called ‘Chicken with Garlic and White Pepper’ (I think) it was chock full of Bird Chilies along with a good dose of crushed White Pepper.
It was not only incendiary it was mind-blowingly delicious.
This was about the same time that Thai Taste on Conn. Ave opened. I took my Parents there and we had the Deep-Fried Whole Fish with Thai Basil Chilli Sauce. They couldn’t wrap theirs heads around the amount of Chilis in the Sauce, but loved it.

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I think Thai Taste had opened a few years before that, maybe in about 1980, shortly after we moved to the DC area in 1979. It was actually Thai Taste I was thinking about when I said Thai restaurants used to be hotter. They served what is still the hottest food I have ever had in a restaurant. And it was tremendous.

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Yes you are right Thai Taste was open earlier than I remembered. It was also the first Thai food I ever ate.

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