Szechuan House opens in East Northport 

It looks like your average Chinese takeout, but Szechuan House, which opened in April in East Northport, has some serious culinary cred: Owner Yuling Chou was the original owner of Spicy Home Tasty, the authentic Sichuan restaurant that opened in Commack in 2017. She sold that eatery in 2020 after its chef, Xian Chun Du, returned to China.

But Xian’s former colleague, Yugui Yan, is in the kitchen in East Northport and reprised most of Spicy Home Tasty’s signature dishes: wontons in chili oil, dandan noodles, beef and tripe in chili oil, mapo tofu among them. Most entrees can be ordered with your choice of protein (chicken, pork, beef, lamb, shrimp, tofu) and are grouped by preparation style: dry pot (stir-fried with vegetables and very little liquid) as well as garlic sauce, dry pepper, scallion and cumin. Cumin lamb, the slices of meat showered with fragrant seeds, originates in Xinjiang in Northwest China but, like many Sichuan dishes, it relies on Sichuan peppercorns for its distinctive mouth-tingling savor. And all of these dishes are traditionally made with an abundance of spicy red and green chilies (although the restaurant is happy to adjust according to customer preference.)

Manager Nick Blanco, who married one of Chou’s daughters, said that the idea behind Szechuan House was “to stand out from the typical Chinese takeout and to deliver real Sichuan cuisine on a smaller scale” in an effort to keep prices reasonable. Nothing on the menu costs more than $19 and most dishes are less than $15. A weekday $9.95 lunch special offers more than 20 choices of entree plus rice and soup or spring roll. 

When you operate a Chinese takeout on a busy commercial stretch — especially one that used to be the conventional Chinese American A Taste of China — you’re going to have a lot of customers expecting wonton and hot-and-sour soups, fried rice, kung pao and General Tso’s chicken, shrimp with broccoli and orange beef. And Szechuan House is happy to oblige. Blanco said that during the first weeks of operation, about half the customers ordered “real Sichuan food. That’s a pretty good number to begin with.”

Indeed, the Chinese food scene now is quite different from what it was in 2017. The last five years have seen an explosion of regional Chinese restaurants opening on Long Island, but when Spicy Home Tasty debuted, it was a shot across the bow to LI’s prevailing Chinese restaurant culture, serving the unadulterated cuisine of the Sichuan region with few concessions to American tastes. Up until then, real Sichuan food had started to pop up in the Stony Brook-area restaurants serving the university’s many Chinese expatriate students but the only region of China well represented here was that of Guangdong (Canton).

Szechuan House is an attractive little eatery, emphasis on little: There are three small tables in the waiting area and, if you dine in, you’ll be served in takeout containers.

Szechuan House, 246 Larkfield Rd., East Northport, 631-770-3733, szechuanhouseli.com. Open Wednesday to Monday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Tuesday.