Chow House

Cuisine Chinese
Price $$ (16-30)
Rating 4/10
Last Visit June 12, 2019
Location New York: Greenwich Village
General Notes

A Sichuan restaurant located at the southwest corner of NYU, straddling the boundary between Greenwich Village and Noho. This restaurant seemed promising and there were a lot of really good reviews online, but the food unfortunately did not live up to the hype. Chow House claims to have very authentic Sichuan food but many of the dishes just felt fundamentally wrong. It can be a decent option for a filling meal, but I would generally not recommend this restaurant.

Positives

> The food is relatively affordable. Almost all of the dishes are under $20 and most are significantly less.
> This is not really a positive, but I was at first really amused that this place was called "Chow House". It sounds much worse than the restaurant actually is.

Negatives

> Even though the restaurant is Sichuan in nature, the food completely lacked the spicy kick that's necessary to bring out the savoriness of the dishes. Almost all of the dishes we ordered were spicy, including a few with three chili signs out of three. Yet never at any point during the meal did I feel like I needed to drink water to alleviate the burn.
> I question their claim that they serve "authentic Sichuan food". A lot of the dishes just feel fundamentally wrong, especially their 水煮牛肉.
> This is not really a negative, but with the check they gave us each a piece of gum. I found this to be extremely strange.

Dishes Tasted
  • ☆☆☆☆ 蒜蓉空心菜 -- This tasted pretty disgusting; though to be fair I'm not really a fan of "water spinach" in the first place.
  • ★★☆☆ 红烧肉 -- It was okay. Reasonably tender but the flavor and color were rather lackluster.
  • ★☆☆☆ 蒜蓉小白菜 -- Not a big fan of bok choy in the first place, so I'm a bit biased against this dish.
  • ★☆☆☆ 麻婆豆腐 -- The tofu was way too soft. So much so that it was virtually impossible to eat with chopsticks. We started calling it "soup"
  • ★★☆☆ 重庆辣子鸡 -- It tasted decent but I'm not sure why the chicken pieces were so small.
  • ☆☆☆☆ 水煮牛肉 -- This dish was just completely wrong. It definitely had the wrong texture - it felt really slimy. There was also very little liquid (which looked strange), and it lacked the savory and spicy kick.
  • ★★★☆ 孜然羊肉 -- The flavor of this dish was good, and it was relatively tender as well.
  • ★★☆☆ 松子鱼 -- Decent, though I've had this dish too many times lately.
  • ★★★☆ 夫妻肺片 -- It had a nice texture, with the peanuts, scallions, and chopped celery. I would have liked to see some tendon, but otherwise it was a solid dish.