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Best Traditional Chinese

  • Grand Sichuan

    15 Seventh Ave. S., nr. Leroy St.; 212-645-0222

    When’s the last time you tasted homemade chicken broth in your wonton soup? Or enjoyed chewy barbecue spare ribs that weren’t lacquered like wax sculptures? Or wafer-thin, crunchy-skinned scallion pancakes not drenched in gallons of old peanut oil? Xiaotu Zhang’s newest restaurant, on lower Seventh Avenue, is the most unassuming member of his successful Grand Sichuan chain, and also the purest. The modestly priced menu reads like a primer on the pleasures of old-fashioned Chinese home cooking. The tea-smoked duck is smoked to order while you wait at your table sipping tea. The thin-skinned wontons are dunked in chili oil. And Chong Qing spicy chicken, that classic Sichuan dish, costs $11.95 and is wreathed in a crown of fiery red peppers.

    See Also
    More Cut-Rate Asian From Adam Platt's Where to Eat 2009

Next: Neighborhood Bistro

From the 2009 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine

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Other Best Of Guides

Our mission this year: to hunt down not just the best but the best values in the eating, shopping, drinking, and general-consuming universe of New York. It’s quite the process, this, requiring eating and shopping and drinking (all in the name of research), followed by heated but civil discussion, and heated but less-civil discussion, until a winner emerges in each category.

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