Red Chilli Sichuan Restaurant (Burwood)

Went for a quick and simple meal last night at Red Chilli Sichuan in Burwood. I’d been discounting the restaurant as ‘just another Chinese restaurant’ so I only realised the other day that it had the same name as an existing restaurant in Chinatown which is well known for its spicy dishes. Turns out, it’s not the second, but third branch of the restaurant.

I love spicy food, but for me there’s a threshold beyond which the food goes from being enjoyable to pure torture on the senses. So it’s a good thing that they included ‘chili ratings’ next to every dish in their menu. One chili meant mild, two meant medium and three meant hot. I don’t remember seeing anything with more than a three chili rating but I can be sure that’s somewhere I definitely wouldn’t want to go. With that in mind, we kept within the one chili range.

On a side note – is chili supposed to be spelt ‘chili’ or ‘chilli’? The restaurant name had it with two l‘s but I’m used to spelling it with only one. *confused* :)

Sichuan Dan Dan Noodle Soup

This is a simple dish with noodles, pork mince and preserved noodles served with a spicy soup. Even for a one chili dish it was hotter than I expected due to the chili oil that was liberally added to the dish and coated every strand of noodle that was drawn out of the soup. Apart from this, the soup is very flavoursome although a little on the salty side for me (definitely more a sauce that you would coat the noodles with and not a soup you would want to slurp down at the end of the meal).

Double Cooked Pork

Yummy! The layered pork in this dish had just the right amount of fat to make the meat tender but not too fatty. The flavours in this dish were sweet and spicy. Perfect with a bowl of plain white rice to counteract the chili oil.