Yi Pin Ju: Szechuan at Last and It's Hot

(updated October 2023)

SZECHUAN AT LAST!
Real Chinese food made by and for real Chinese people is hard to find in this town. Asian Bay, our only fine dining venue, does a good job providing Cantonese fare, a smattering of regional dishes, and homey ambiance. A handful of Cantonese restaurants clustered in the Viaducto Piedad neighborhood feed recent immigrants; good Southern fare and even dim sum can be found here. Great Szechuan food, until recently was nonexistent. But a humble, oddly placed resto in the middle of Zona Rosa, preparing this beloved fiery cuisine, opened a few years ago and then closed during the pandemic. Yi Pin Ju has re-opened with an expanded menu.

The mainstay of its menu comes from the southwest provinces of Szechuan and Shaanxi to its north where the balance of ma-la—spicy and numbing—is the goal. Szechuan pepper is omnipresent as are chiles, dry and fresh. A number of dishes are labeled "estilo sichuan" which implies a red, oily sauce that attempts to numb and stimulate at the same time, kind of a gustatory martini/valium cocktail. Borrego (lamb) flavored with cumin is common in Shaanxi and here is offered as a whole beast—I did not order it—or, better, shredded and stuffed into a steamed wheat bao.

Meaty dumplings filled with pork and chive are boiled and served with a fragrant red dipping sauce of chile oil and black vinegar and they could make a meal in and of themselves. Flat rice noodles are perfectly agri/picante but so much so that my norteño companion asked for a glass of milk to numb the pain. I thought they were perfect. Oven roasted duck is tender, and succulent. Pollo tierno estilo sichuan turns out to be little crisp morsels of boned chicken deep fried and mouthwateringly fragrant of pepper and star anise. Tiras de cerdo en salsa especial de pescado is not, in fact, pork done in fish sauce as it sounds but in a tart brown sauce meant FOR fish, and it is spicy but not cruelly so. Dry cooked green beans, impregnated by dry red chiles that are best avoided, are verdant and crunchy. Carne recocida sabor de Sichuan is lightly oily, dry thin-cut pork which, in its twice-cooking, has soaked up the essence of several kinds of chiles and onions.

While seafood is not a specialty here, salt and pepper shrimp avoids the often grease-laden floured preparation in favor of quick deep frying; the shrimp therefore remain moist and tender.

Several Asian greens are offered steamed with garlic or oyster sauce; they offset the other sultry plates nicely and are a welcome respite.

Here’s the bad news: the menu, presented only as a downloadable QR code, comes mostly, but not, illogically, only, in Chinese! On a recent visit, I was able to take screenshots and use Google Translate to plow through it. But it’s worth the effort. A “fish flavored eggplant” was tart, sweetish and picante, beautifully balanced. Xi’an Liangpi, cold peanut noodles, made me want to lick the plate clean. It’s worth the effort. Of course, it would be easier, if your Mandarin is rusty, to invite a Chinese-speaking friend.

Ambience is minimal as in many a great Asian restaurant in Asia and without. Dishes range from $175-425, several beyond $600; it's not cheap but portions are large and sharing or leftover takeaway is the key to success. The average with a beer should be $350, less in a large group. But the food is extraordinary and a welcome addition to our expanding panoply of honest Asian options in the capital.

Some suggestions for those who don’t read Chinese:
Mapo Tofu
Berenjena sabor pescado (fish flavor eggplant)

Yangzhao fried rice
Xi’an Liangpi (cold peanut noodles)
Cold Fungus (tree ear salad)
Pescado estilo Sichuan

Yi Pin Ju
Londres 114, between Genova & Amberes, next to the Hotel Geneve, Colonia Juarez aka Zona Rosa
Tel. 55 55145837, 544696072
Open daily from 12 until 9 p.m.
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