Review: My Sichuan, Oxford

Oxford seems to have a thing for good, cheap oriental dining. All of the big London critics have snuck out to academia and waxed lyrical about Zheng, SoJo, Oli’s Thai and My Sichuan. So what better to sandwich in between the sketches of Raphael at the Ashmolean and a film at the indie Ultimate Picture House than a bite to eat at My Sichuan?

It’s great venue, an old school house of Oxford stone with little original features like the stained glass windows depicting nursery rhyme scenes. The dining room details – furnishing, crockery, service – are absolutely straight out of every other basic Chinese restaurant you’ve ever been to; basic seating, chipped teapots, and staff who can only get your order right if you point to it on the menu. But that’s all to the good, who rates style over substance anyway?

Okay, so then I skipped past all the probably amazing slow-roasted lamb dishes and picked a dish described as “black pudding with vegetables in chillies”. And because of some very fond memories of a Sichuan restaurant in Birmingham, I chose duck tongues in spicy sauce for a second dish. To balance, we also went for aubergine in spice and Chinese spinach with garlic. And rice, of course.

The duck tongues weren’t as good as the ones I enjoyed in Brum. There was an ambiguously fragrant flavour, the yielding little bits of meat were fine, but the overall experience was of oil. And really that was the overall experience of the whole meal. The Chinese spinach with garlic I really rather likes. The aubergine pieces were both sweet and spicy, but became a struggle as my throat kept telling me just how much oil they had soaked into them.

The black pudding dish was oddest of all. And here I can’t really cry foul; no doubt this is exactly what a Sichuan native would expect, it just rather threw me. The black pudding was indeed black, but it had the texture of fresh tofu and no discernable flavour at all. Disappointing. The dish (a huge bowl, really a tiny swimming pool) also contained a number of pieces of… well… spam. Yeah, pretty certain it was spam. The final meaty components were some long and convoluted pieces of peppery and flavoursome tripe. And these were, I must say, reeeeeeally good. Underneath all the protien lurked a whole bag of beansprouts – the “vegetables” of the description. And the broth this all swam in was generically spicy and, you guessed it, fairly oily.

I mean, you can’t fault My Sichuan for a menu laden with authentic offal-heavy oddities. I’ve never been to China, but I can imagine diving into a cheap Sichuan restaurant in a big city I’d probably find something similar. And if all the reviews from the big London papers are true, it sounds like we really missed out by skipping their more familiar slow-roast meats (and I’d be willing to go back and give it another try). But please don’t go expecting something modern, thoughtful or balanced – My Sichuan is Chinese, old school.