Golden Chopstick Restaurant

It is no surprise that I would feature food once in a while, after all, I’m a certified foodie and would usually go out of my way to try something nice and different. I have probably not featured any other cuisine more than I have done for Sichuan cuisine. Sichuan cuisine is the food from the Chinese province of Sichuan. It is known for its fiery and strong flavors. It is here that “numbing” also becomes a flavor as they practically live on the stuff.

We wanted to eat at this new place in Singapore’s Chinatown called Golden Chopstick. This was supposedly some sort of successor to a previously featured restaurant called Ba Yu Ren Jia 巴渝人家, which apparently has closed down. The owner of Ba Yu Ren Jia has since helped a friend set up another restaurant called Golden Chopstick, he is currently serving as one of the cooks in the new restaurant. Having been to the old restaurant I had rather high expectations with this restaurant. I wonder how it does.

The Golden Chopstick Restaurant is along Smith Street which is basically gathering all Chinese restaurants in its locale. A few of my favorite restaurants are there. The restaurant itself isn’t that special, in fact you could say it was hastily designed. I did come for the food though, so how was it? Well, the specialty of the restaurant seems to be hotpot or steamboat as it is known in Singapore. Practically the entire restaurant is eating hotpot when we went there. They do have a small a la carte menu, but that should be good enough for us.

Naturally, we ordered our old favorites, after all, how will we judge how good a restaurant is if we didn’t try something we know? Their spicy chicken 辣子鸡 comes in one large bowl of scary looking fried chicken cubes. It comes in three levels of spicyness, we naturally chose the deadliest level, the waiter later on said that as much as possible they want to prepare it as spicy as possible since this is the way it was supposed to be done back in China. So spicy it is. The spicy chicken was definitely spicy, to the uninitiated, the spice might be a little way too much, as a friend of mine can attest. In fact, I was taken aback the the intensity of the spiciness. It was good though.

The problem with having the spicy chicken is that it tends to overwhelm the rest of the food. Another standout dish was the twice cooked pork 回锅肉, the strong flavors of Sichuan which I have come to love all come together in this lovely dish, this is another must. I suggest you eat this before you take the spicy chicken though. Other noteworthy dish was the Mapo Tofu it was tasty, but it didn’t have much of the numbing feeling I had in other Sichuan restaurants. Could it be because of the spicy chicken?

Best of all, is that the meal didn’t cost us an arm and a leg, since it was very reasonable. It is best to bring a lot of friends around four or more to be able to order as many dishes as possible. Although the staff doesn’t really speak a lot of English, if you can speak Chinese, they were very helpful. I heartily recommend having trying out the a la carte dishes, just remember to sequence your food. The next time I come here, I would probably try their hotpot, although I don’t see a lot of China Chinese eating here. Which makes me wonder.

[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/GoldenChopstickRestaurant.kmz} zoom=19]