Location, location, location, my ass.
Mark Manger
The kitchen at Szechuan Chinese Restaurant knows
how to turn up the heat.
Location Info
Details
9090 West Sixth Avenue, Lakewood, 303-
232-4558. Hours: 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.
Monday-Friday; 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.
Saturday-Sunday
Dumplings: $5.25
Wonton soup (for
2): $3.50
Sizzling rice soup: $5.50-
$10.50
Salt and pepper shrimp:
$10.25
Sweet and sour chicken:
$7.95
Beef with snow peas: $8.25<
br>Royal chicken: $7.95
Tofu: $6.95
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For decades, Szechuan Chinese Restauranthas been doing business in one of the worst imaginable locations in all of restaurantdom, holding down a chunky, L-shaped space folded into the elbow of a nearly inaccessible strip mall off a one-way frontage road running beneath and beside a fast-moving stretch of Sixth Avenue in Lakewood. Driving along that busy highway, you glimpse the place for only half a second -- the gleam of neon, a Tsingtao beer sign, its name blinking between treetops and traffic -- and to get there, you have to pass it by, exit, backtrack past the high school and the jail, drive the wrong way along a one-way street for about two dozen feet and then find the blind entrance to the Meadowlark Plaza parking lot. There may be easier, less circuitous ways to get to Szechuan, but this is the only one I know. And I still get lost every time and have to reverse my way out, untangle myself from the maze of U-turns and access roads, start fresh.
Szechuan is flanked by a cluttered liquor store and a Family Dollar so brightly lit by bare white fluorescents that it seems to sizzle in the dark. There's a cabinet store, a breakfast bar, a coffee shop/bookstore where you can get your palm read or buy crystals to balance your chi, and a storefront where you can learn to speak Italian. After six o'clock, though, most of the parking lot is empty, with all the action concentrated down at the far end -- Szechuan's end. Peek through the smoked-glass windows filled with signs and menus and you'll see that inside, Szechuan is jumping.
It's not full -- I don't think I've ever seen the place completely full. But it's busy. It's almost always busy. Monday night at eight? Busy. Saturday at five? Busy. Super Bowl Sunday? Killer busy, with extra waitresses laid on, a non-stop parade of take-away going out the door, and a busser who'd go around to any table that was interested and give the current score, the count, yardage, and a brief rundown of who was looking good and who was fading. Although a small TV up front was tuned to the game, it was more fun to get the busser's tableside updates, complete with opinion and speculation and play-by-play. For those of us who cared, it was like having our own private color man working the room.
Fortunately, busy is enough for a place like this. I've spent too much time in little, lost neighborhood Chinese spots eating entirely alone. To me, there's no soundscape quite so grim as the scrape of a single spoon scooping the sauce out of the bottom of a single platter of kung pao chicken in an otherwise empty dining room, the rattle of a single chair scuffing the floor, or the constant squeak of a kitchen door opening and closing as the single waiter checks the floor, waiting for those customers who resolutely refuse to come. Conversely, I am perhaps inordinately pleased by the buzz of a room in use: the screaming children, the clatter of dropped silver, the shouts in Chinese from the back, the chatter of the table of six asking time after time after time for more white rice, more white rice, more white rice. In a place like this, I can relax. I can take my time reading the menu and not feel bad about demanding a couple extra minutes to internally debate spare ribs or sliced pork, hot garlic tofu versus two kinds of meat. At Szechuan, my server will just nod and move on to the next table, then the next, and eventually work her way back around to me.
Still, with its terrible, invisible location and all the other Chinese choices around town -- the Cantonese and Mandarin and Szechuan options, both Americanized and authentic, the dim sum restaurants and takeout joints, the peasant food and party food -- how does Szechuan manage to stay busy?
Time and patience play a big part. Szechuan has been operating in this location seven days a week for close to thirty years, and over that period, it's built up a dedicated crowd of regulars. Tradition is important, too: Szechuan was one of the first serious sit-down Chinese restaurants to open in the western suburbs, and one of the first serious Szechuan restaurants to open anywhere in Denver. The service is friendly, quick and accommodating. The menu is huge, with well over a hundred options, not counting lunch (which adds another 75 plates to the mix). The prices are low (topping out under twelve bucks), the portions are big and the flavors fresh.
But really, there's just one reason Szechuan stays so busy: the dumplings. This kitchen makes the best dumplings I've eaten in Colorado, the best I've found anywhere in the Southwest, maybe the best between Chicago and the California border. And I'm a man who takes his dumplings very, very seriously. I've eaten a lot of them. Dumplings from the East and dumplings from the West, American and Asian and Russian and European dumplings, classical dumplings and awful, terrible fusiony dumplings, and dumplings that are only dumplings by the loosest of all possible definitions. I have long said that while the human race has plenty that divides us, dumplings are one of those rare things that unite us all. I am hard-pressed to think of a single culture or country that does not have a dumpling recipe of some kind somewhere in its traditional canon. From American low-country cookpots to the heights of Everest, dumplings are everywhere.
