It’s been almost two months since my previous Grand Szechuan report but don’t worry, they’re still in business and we’re still eating their food on the regular. As of August 1 they are once again open seven days a week, but they’re still open only for takeout. That takeout business appears to be brisk—at least on weekend evenings. The place was hopping—in a masked and socially-distanced kind of way—when I picked up our most recent meal on a Friday evening. There seemed to be more staff visible as well. I hope they’re doing decent business at lunch and on weekdays as well. But to be safe we should all keep ordering from them.

This report covers food picked up for two dinners, two weeks apart. Both meals were eaten on our deck with different subsets of the group of friends we ate there with most often in the Before Times. Both meals involved a lot of food which meant there were a lot of leftovers on both occasions and we got to eat Grand Szechuan meals for a few days in a row. There are worse fates but now I think we might need to go a bit longer before our next takeout run from them.

Herewith an image-heavy look at what we ate in the hope of enticing you to take a look at their menu and give them a call.

Dinner 1

Particular highlights for me at this meal were the pig ears, the beef tongue, the fashion spring spicy chicken and the fish with chopped dry pepper. Which is not to say that anything else was bad—even the triple flavour squid traveled better on this occasion than on the previous.

Dinner 2

Highlights at this meal for me included the beef tendon, the beef and tofu with chopped jalapeno (though I suspect I like this more than any of our friends), the mapo tofu and the piao xiang fish fillet (which we really need to get more often). Again, everything was very good, in my opinion—though not everyone was a fan of the bamboo shoots in chilli oil.

Okay, next week’s pandemic takeout report will likely ease up on the chillies and the oil. The plan is more Middle Eastern food from the South Metro—let’s see if that happens. And for our next Sichuan meal I think I may try to convince our friends to let me drive past Grand Szechuan and go into Minneapolis for a pickup from Szechuan Spice (who are hopefully also still in business).