Private Kitchen: Low-key, welcoming and affordable — The Manchurian Candidate is everything we want in a Sichuan private kitchen.

Look & Feel: Find your way through the dingy commercial building and you’ll stumble into this well-hidden restaurant. The small space can squeeze in about 20 diners at once, with casual tables and nothing fancy. The room has a warm, family feel to it and you can even see one of the kids’ finger paintings on the walls.

On the Menu: For dinner, The Manchurian Candidate does a free-flow of dishes that come out pretty much until you can’t take one more bite. The Sichuan standard menu ($200 per person) includes about eight dishes that can easily be shared between a small group of people. Lunch is a a la carte and you can order everything from Yibin-style noodles to spicy chicken.

Service: It’s a tiny place with a lot of mouths to feed, so there’s not a ton of lingering interaction but the service is snappy and smiley all the same. 

Jeng: Dinner is a great deal for the amount of food that keeps pouring onto your table. The marinated eggplant is divine, as is the spicy beef as well as the crispy Sichuan green beans. Everything is pretty darn good, but nothing is mind-blowing.

Not so Jeng: They take the phrase “add oil” a little too seriously here. One night we went with a group of expats and felt like the spice was dumbed down for us. We wish they would jack that shit back up!

Great For: Big groups, bigger appetites.

FYI: It’s BYOB!

This writeup was based on an independent tasting. The Loop doesn’t guarantee/sell restaurant review coverage. See our editorial policy here.