Chinese

Chung King — King of Spicy

Tucked away in an unassuming corner building on San Gabriel is a restaurant that anyone who is a fan of spicy food should try: Chung King. The restaurant’s signature dishes focus around the mouth numbing spiciness that comes from Szechwan peppercorn and chili peppers — which make those dishes delicious, but dangerous at the same time. It’s hard to gauge how spicy something is when your tongue is numb.

At the front of the restaurant is a small glass case with cold appetizers to choose from for immediate satisfaction. For the meat eaters at our table, we chose the slices of spicy beef and the smoked chicken. The slices of beef were flavorful, numbing, and they weren’t skimpy on the chili oil. The smoked chicken is a good choice for people who can’t handle spicy food because it’s not spicy, but still tasty. I don’t usually like cold chicken, but the smokiness made me keep eating it.

For the vegetarians and vegans, we also had a vegetable appetizer plate with spicy cabbage and bean sprout salad. The cabbage is different than kimchi because it’s not fermented and isn’t as sour. The bean sprout salad is deceptive because even though it’s not red, it still has a bit of that numbing mala taste from peppercorns.

The cold noodles we ordered was under the menu as “Cold Szechuan Noodles” or something similar. They’re not that spicy and the noodles have an odd starchy texture almost like they were overcooked. The sauce it came with was sweeter than we expected. The weren’t bad but I don’t think I would be ordering them again.

My favorite dish on their menu is their house spicy chicken bits. It’s bite-sized pieces of chicken that are battered and fried like popcorn chicken. Unlike popcorn chicken, they are then tossed with chili peppers, peppercorn and green onion. The dish is salty and tasty but so spicy it’s painful, but I can’t stop eating it. They should just rename this dish “Exquisite Torture”.

A signature dish when it comes to spicy Chinese food is Mapo Tofu. We ordered the vegan version, Mala Tofu which is pretty much Mapo Tofu without the ground meat. Yes, the dish was every bit as spicy as it is red. It’s the same type of numbing spicy that’s used for almost every spicy dish at Chung King, but I still haven’t gotten tired of it.

To give our tastebuds a break from the pain, we also ordered the claypot eggplant (Szechuan Eggplant on the menu) and asked them to omit the meat to make it vegan. The sauce is cloyingly sweet and the eggplant is tender, but it tastes like your usual claypot eggplant that you can get at any Chinese restaurant in the SGV.

Finally, for people who definitely can’t eat anything spicy, we ordered the crispy rice with fish. The waitress brought us a plate of crispy rice (think un-sweetened rice crispy treats) and a bowl of slices of fish with vegetables and mushroom in sauce, and then poured the bowl on top of the plate of crispy rice with a sizzle. The fish tasted like your generic white fish, and the entire dish wasn’t amazing, but with the crispy rice, it was great. I had many bites of this dish to cool off my mouth.

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Chung King
1000 S San Gabriel Blvd
San Gabriel, CA 91776

By Louise (see more of her posts). You can find more of Louise's writing at her own website NakedSushi.

© 2008 la.foodblogging.