Before I get to the review, let me first start with all the things that are great.
The people are very nice. The restaurant is very clean. The QR-code menus work well. The seats are comfortable. The food pricing is fine. It smells good inside. The parking lot is sufficiently sized. The location is relatively convenient. They take credit cards.
Solely based on those things, Ni Chou Sha would get 5 stars.
Unfortunately, we also have to include the food in a restaurant review, and this was unfortunately not very good.
This is not to say the food was using poor quality ingredients - everything was fresh. It's just that the dishes themselves are not very appealing. I've eaten a lot of regional varieties of Chinese food and this is my first time trying this cuisine, and while I went in with an open mind I just couldn't get past how bland and boring everything was.
We started with Five Color Jelly Noodles. This is like vegetables and flat wide noodles with a sesame paste sauce. It tasted a little bit like sesame, that's it.
Next we had Dongbei Chunky Soup, which is like congee with some chopped up vegetables inside. It reminded me of some kind of bland canned food you'd give to a baby. Not that it tasted bad, it just didn't taste like anything.
Stir Fried Chile Pepper with Tofu Skin was next, requested extra spicy. It tasted like pure nothing. Some good textures but absolutely no flavor. Not even slightly spicy either. The peppers in the dish had to have been bell peppers, they weren't even remotely hot.
After that the last of the side dishes came, Stir Fried Pork Intestines. I am somewhat wary of these as poorly cleaned intestines can be unpleasant to eat. But these had zero smell and were very tender. But aside from the faintest hint of soy sauce, again, it was very bland.
Finally, the iron pots, Ni Chou Sha's claim to fame. We ordered two, the Fish Stew and the Northeastern One-Pot Pork Stew.
Side note: these pots INDIVIDUALLY can serve 6 people. So don't come here thinking you'll try a couple pots with your group of 4. One pot is gigantic.
Also, if you're at one of the tables with two depressions, be warned that one side of the table will have to exit the table for the pot to be put down. These iron pots are actually rather inconvenient to eat out of, as I would learn.
The fish stew came with about a pound of noodles, these giant pieces of cornbread, and a ton of cabbage. Buried within were some slices of pork and an indeterminate fish which had barely any texture. This dish was a little spicy, which was good, but it had zero other flavor. Not salty, not sour, not soy, not herbaceous - just some heat. And everything was brown or greenish-brown. Textures of all the things beside the fish were fine but I just couldn't get past the taste.
The pork pot was a bit less successful. For some reason it seemed to have the funky intestine smell that I expected the intestines to have, which was off putting. This might just be a personal thing as everyone else in my group said they actually preferred it.
It's always good to try new things, and my taste may be different than others. But bottom line the food just doesn't appeal to me. read more