Little Szechuan

University Avenue in St. Paul is home to some of the finest Asian restaurants in Minnesota (some may say the U.S.). Most of the restaurants on this strip are tiny holes-in-the-wall offering fantastic food and personal, somewhat quaint service.

Little Szechuan looks completely unremarkable from the outside, but on the inside one will find a reasonably nicely appointed space with new paint, tasteful decorations, and ample seating. I feel they did as much as they could with the space. The restaurant has a constant din, but no one had to raise their voice to speak at the table or order.

Service:

We went on a Friday evening without a reservation and were seated immediately. (Little Szechuan will only take reservations for groups of 6 or more). When we arrived the restaurant was about 2/3's full and continuing to fill. By the time we left every table was occupied with at least 2 dozen people waiting. Service was absolutely dismal, starting with an improperly dressed hostess who tried to seat our group of 5 at a 4 person table when there were empty 6 spot tables around (a floor manager righted this wrong). This segued into a confused serving team (we saw at least 5 different servers who apparently had not been communicating with one another). Servers were either not around enough or doing redundant tasks and also brought three wrong dishes to our table. The only good points about the service were the splitting of the bill at the end and the assistants who were excellent at keeping water glasses full.

Food:

The food was absolutely amazing. The soups we had (wonton, hot and sour, winter melon) were lovely, light starters. Fried wontons and crab cakes were best in class. Little Szechuan has two menus, the green one has more of the regular offerings that one will see at any local Chinese restaurant. The black menu is a bound, fully laminated 150 item plus menu with color photos of some of the items and a wide variety of exotic and spicy dishes. Our table had the stir fried fish fillet, squid hot pot, cumin lamb, stir fried beef entrails, duck with taro, pork with bamboo, and potato with green pepper. Every dish was fantastic, and the prices are very fair, the same price or less than other Chinese restaurants for much better food.

Summary and Miscellaneous information:

Little Szechuan has been receiving quite a bit of positive attention from the local press and by the end of the evening I got the feeling that they were not ready for business resulting from those reviews. The food was as good as expected from those reviews. The service was unfortunately poor enough to discourage future visits. Gunslinger and I have decided that it might be best to go for lunch during the week since there are many more menu items to try.

Parking did not seem to be a problem. The wine list was almost non-existent. When asked about a corkage policy, the server seemed confused and said something not quite coherent about how the restaurant did not want people bringing in their own wine due to liability.

We'll go again. I'll probably bring some of my own wine and just see what happens. We'll also try either a lunch or dinner during the week. Thinking about our experience, the poor service seemed to be largely due to poor floor management than the servers themselves.

Website: http://www.littleszechuan.com/