Grub Scout: Wide array of dim sum, Asian dishes awaits at Little Szechuan

It had been many months since I'd sat down for a meal at a good ol' mom-and-pop Asian-food restaurant. I ended that dry spell recently when a friend and I met for lunch at Little Szechuan on Kingston Pike.

The essentially nondescript dining room is spacious, consisting of several rows of booths in the front section and lots of table-and-chair seating in the back half. After scoring a booth, we were handed several menus to peruse, including their regular dinner entrees, lunch specials and their dim sum fare.

For those uninitiated into the world of dim sum, the term refers to small, snack-sized portions of food — the Asian version of tapas, you might say. My Grub Buddy and I thought we'd do some damage in that arena, so we skimmed through a list of interesting-sounding items such as bean curd skin with pork, steamed custard bun, pan-fried turnip cake and a mysteriously generic listing simply identified as "dessert."

Individual dim sum selections are offered in small, medium and large serving sizes ranging from $2.50 to $3.75. As much as I tried to convince my friend to get the stewed chicken feet, she steered us toward the chicken sticky rice in lotus leaf, and I put in my two cents' worth with an order of shrimp dumplings.

That task aside, we moved on to the luncheon specials, forgoing a main menu that emphasizes Szechuan entrees in such categories as beef, chicken and duck, seafood, pork and vegetable. We got a kick out of the fact that the veggie section offers several dishes made with pork, so honest-to-God vegetarians beware.

The luncheon specials are reasonably priced, starting at $5.25 and topping out at $7.25. Meals include kung pao chicken, moo goo gai pan, Mongolian beef, stir-fried ham with leeks, shrimp with cashew nuts, chicken lo mein, spicy sesame noodles and several tofu-based creations, to name just a representative sample of the nearly 50 Asian dishes available between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. All are served with soup and steamed rice.

My friend ordered a simple and straightforward veggie-noodle dish, while I decided to try the shredded pork with spicy garlic sauce. The menu indicated that it was, indeed, a zesty item, and that sounded appealing to me. After a not-unreasonably long wait, our server brought our dim sum items out first, followed shortly by the lunch entrees. The sticky rice, aptly named, came wrapped in large, thick lotus leaves, which we intuitively unwrapped before digging into the pleasing but interestingly flavored rice mixture. The shrimp dumplings were appropriately briny in flavor, tender in texture and offered no surprises, although I thought the dumpling component was minimal.

My friend's noodles and vegetables were solid — a heaping portion that delivered with soy flavor that didn't overpower and a diverse mix of Asian vegetables for additional color, taste and texture.

I thought the shredded pork was quite good — spicy enough to get my attention but not so spicy that the pleasant burning sensation wore out its welcome. The blend of meat, pungent sauce and liberally added bits of garlic made me sad to have to stop at the halfway point out of sheer satiety.

The main downer was the service we received. They weren't terribly busy, but we had to wait long stretches to get follow-up visits from the young man who waited on us, and even as I write, I am just now realizing that he never brought me my soup.

Oh well, you dim sum and you lose some.

© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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