Chongqing Chicken Obsession, Part Two
In my last dispatch from Chongqing chicken obsession, I told you about eating the dish--composed mainly of chiles, augmented with some fried chicken--at Grand Sichuan House in Bay Ridge and Grand Sichuan St. Marks, in the East Village.
The dish is named after its native home, Chongqing, a municipality near Sichuan province that Fuschia Dunlop describes as having a "filthy magnificence." I don't know about filthy, but Chong Qing chicken is magnificent. It involves dried red chiles, sliced fresh green chiles and a great quantity of mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorns, fried in oil with garlic and tossed with bite-sized nubbins of fried chicken.
Today I came across Metro Cafe, a month-old restaurant on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park's Chinatown--and it's the first proper Sichuan restaurant I know of in the neighborhood. I'm planning on doing a full review, so I don't want to scoop myself here, but this restaurant is a weird and wonderful place, combining traditional Sichuan dishes with an assortment of Japanese snacks and Beijing-style grilled skewers.
But today we're just here to obsess over the Chongqing chicken, which I present to you above, in its cardboard container, its marvelousness undiluted by taking it to go.
Metro Cafe
4924 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn
718-437-7980
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