Chengdu Style Restaurant
Chengdu Style dumplings come flecked with green onion in a red chili oil KQED called the best part of the plate. April, Bo and Jun Hu are from Chengdu and cook it a block off the Cal campus.
Why go
The owners are Chengdu expats and Cal alumni, and the menu splits between the Chinese-American dishes a student room needs and the peppercorn-studded Sichuan cooking they came with.1 Prices sit low, portions run large, and the room fills with students eating soup out of oversized bowls. Shelby Pope caught the detail that tells you what kind of place it is: the menus are scribbled on, with handwritten price updates and a steamed bums
corrected to buns.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the Chengdu Style dumplings. KQED:
hearty and juicy, flecked with green onions, but the best part is the red chili oil that characterizes the region's dishes. Sweet, salty and spicy, it enlivens every bite.
1 - Avoid: ordering off the Chinese-American half if the Sichuan is what you came for.
What locals & experts say
- KQED, Bay Area Bites, Shelby Pope, 19 August 2016: the room is
a Cal student's dream, conveniently located steps from the campus and offering hearty portions at affordable prices.
1
Good to know
- Booking: walk in.
- Getting there: Bancroft Way at College, on the south edge of campus.
- No website: the restaurant publishes none, so call ahead for hours. KQED printed (510) 845-5807.1
Verdict
listed — One source carries this entire page, and it is a guide entry from August 2016. Shelby Pope did name the owners, say where they are from and describe what the chili oil does, so it is not a listing. It is still one paragraph, ten years old. Worse for a reader, the restaurant publishes no site of its own, so I cannot tell you the room is still cooking. A confident rung on that record would be a guess dressed up, and the caveat is the more useful thing to hand over.