Chengdu Gourmet 2 is open. The Sichuan restaurant celebrated its grand opening on Saturday, Aug. 27 and opened to the public on Wednesday, Aug. 30. The 6,000-square-foot restaurant is in the former Oriental Market on McKnight Road, but you’d never know the space used to be a grocery store.
It’s been a long road for executive chef and co-owner Wei Zhu, who spent more than a year transforming the location into an elegant restaurant with room for nearly 200 people.
The primary dining room is open and airy, with a long banquette on the far wall, colorful Eames-style chairs at square and circular tables for smaller parties and larger, sturdy wood tables with Lazy Susans on the far end for bigger groups. Attached to the main dining room is a separate party room with two 20-seat, double-stacked rotary table tops for large parties. The walls are lined with artwork digitally rendered by Zhu. And there’s a full bar.
It’s a significant upgrade from the charming yet decidedly casual interior of the original Chengdu Gourmet space in Squirrel Hill (which will remain open).
“He [Zhu] and his family came to the United States to succeed, but with a language barrier that made it hard to start a business. But he’s so skillful a chef that, step-by-step, he was able to open a small restaurant and build a following of a lot of people who came to appreciate how delicious his food is. And now, he is able to open something even bigger. There’s a real feeling of achievement. It’s his American dream,” says Dave Jiao, who runs the Pittsburgh Chinese Cultural Center.
Zhu’s kitchen has a custom-built gas line to fire the array of seven concrete-enclosed wok stations. In addition, there are new stoves, a high-end oven capable of roasting and smoking meats and a station for deep-fried foods. There also is lots of cold storage space for all the mise en place (this style of Chinese food tends to be heavy on the preparation and then cooked quickly prior to service).
“You’ll find your favorite dishes from the original location on this menu but this is very much expanded. It’s about twice as large as the original restaurant, so you’ll have many new items to try,” says Zhu via Jiao, who interpreted for this story.
Zhu’s hefty new menu goes deep into Sichuan dishes. The region, home to one of China’s eight great cuisines, is best known for its signature ma-la mix of numbing Sichuan peppercorns and fiery hot peppers. But Zhu says the new space will allow him to dive even deeper into his home province’s traditional and contemporary cookery. For example, one thing he says he’s been longing to do more of is work with a variety of fish.
“I’m going to have fish shipped to me every day from suppliers in New York and Canada,” he says.
The move to the North Hills is a return for Zhu, who first cooked in Pittsburgh kitchens at China Star (now Ting’s Kitchen) in McCandless. Zhu opened Chengdu Gourmet Squirrel Hill in 2014, and for the past five years, he’s earned a nod as a semifinalist in the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic category at the James Beard Awards.
“This restaurant and this cuisine is not just for the Chinese community. It’s for all residents of Pittsburgh. We want all of the people in the neighborhoods near this new restaurant to come try us. And we welcome all the customers of the old Chengdu Gourmet to visit us here, too, because there is so much new for you to try here,” Zhu says.
4768 McKnight Rd.; chengdugourmet2.com
This story was updated on Sept. 2.
Hal B. Klein: hklein@post-gazette.com, Twitter @halbklein and IG @halbklein.
First Published: August 26, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: August 26, 2022, 10:42 a.m.
