Chinese Taste on State Street: The Sichuan Sleeper That South Salt Lake Won't Stop Ordering From

Pull off State Street at the strip mall just south of 3300, past the auto-body shop and the LDS thrift store, and you'll find Chinese Taste tucked into Suite F like it doesn't want to be found. The sign is small. The dining room is small. The chairs are the cafeteria-grade kind that nobody bothered to upgrade. And then the food comes out and the math stops making sense — bowls of Chongqing noodles slick with chili oil, charcoal-singed skewers, a whole spicy boiled fish swimming in Sichuan peppercorn broth that fizzles across your tongue like a 9-volt battery wrapped in lard.

"Everything was tastier delicious, the best Chinese food I've ever had," one customer wrote on the Yelp listing, which — Yelp reviews being what they are — would be easy to discount, except you walk in at 7 p.m. on a weeknight and see the dining room full of Chinese families eating dishes the menu doesn't bother to translate. That's the tell. Chinese Taste isn't dressed up for a Western palate. It's dressed up for the regulars, and the regulars know exactly what they're ordering.

The State Street Corridor Sichuan Spot That Locals Have Quietly Adopted

Chinese Taste opened in 2018 in the stretch of State Street that runs through South Salt Lake — not downtown SLC, not the chef-driven dining row on 200 South, but the working spine that connects Murray to the city limit. This is the corridor where Salt Lake's actual Chinese food lives. A handful of dim sum spots, a couple of Cantonese veterans, a Mongolian hot pot place, and now Chinese Taste — which arrived speaking the dialect that Utah's Chinese food scene had been missing: real Sichuan, real Beijing-style noodles, real charcoal BBQ.

The menu is sprawling in the way that small family-run Chinese kitchens are sprawling. Sichuan dishes — mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, dry-fried green beans, spicy boiled fish — share menu space with Beijing-style hand-pulled noodles, Shanxi knife-cut noodles, Chongqing dan dan noodles. There's Peking duck if you call ahead. There are potstickers and pan-fried buns and the kind of charcoal-grilled lamb skewers that turn up at street stalls in Xi'an. There are Chinese hamburgers — rou jia mo — that show up under the BBQ section. There's hot pot in the back room if you go with a group. The Yelp listing notes 369 photos and 208 reviews. The Google listing is sitting at 4.1 stars across 625 reviews, with regular updates well into April 2026, which is the kind of activity level that tells you the place is still moving.

What Stuart Melling Wrote About the Spicy Boiled Fish (And Why It Still Holds)

The most useful third-party write-up on Chinese Taste came from Stuart Melling at Gastronomic Salt Lake City — Utah's longest-running food publication and a former Salt Lake Tribune restaurant critic. Melling ordered the spicy boiled fish on DoorDash and wrote about it like a man who had finally found the thing he'd been looking for. "Like a capsaicin-jonesing moth to the Sichuan flame, I was immediately drawn in by the spicy boiled fish," he wrote. "A dish that few cook around these parts."

This is the dish to know. Spicy boiled fish — shui zhu yu — is the Sichuan benchmark, and Chinese Taste's version is the one Salt Lake's chili-heads have been working toward for years. Flaky white fish poached in a chili-and-peppercorn broth that's loaded with garlic, ginger, fermented black beans, and enough Sichuan peppercorn to make your lips tingle for an hour. Cabbage and bean sprouts in the broth for crunch. A small side of rice. The portion is enormous — Melling noted it came out in two huge containers — and the price runs $15.99 for what's effectively two meals.

If you're new to Sichuan peppercorn, this is where you find out what ma la means. The numbness is the point. The capsaicin heat is one axis; the peppercorn buzz is the other. Chinese Taste runs both dials hard.

Beyond the Boiled Fish: What to Order at Chinese Taste

The other thing the kitchen does well is the noodle program. Beijing noodles, Shanxi knife-cut noodles, Chongqing dan dan — these are not interchangeable. The Shanxi noodles are wide, irregular, chewy, the kind of texture that comes from a knife shaving ribbons off a block of dough straight into boiling water. The Chongqing noodles are skinny and slick with chili oil and Sichuan peppercorn, with peanuts and pickled vegetables and ground pork on top. "Dumplings are my favorites," one customer wrote on Yelp, "but to be honest everything was tastier delicious." The dumplings — pork and chive, pork and cabbage, the lamb version — are hand-folded and run roughly fifteen to a basket.

The charcoal BBQ section is where the menu gets fun. Skewers of lamb, beef, chicken wings, enoki mushrooms, and lotus root come dusted with the cumin-and-chili powder you'd find at a Xi'an night market. Order four or five and split them. The Chinese hamburgers — rou jia mo — are a working-class Xi'an street food: braised pork shoulder packed into a griddled flatbread, no sauce, no fuss, the kind of two-bite snack you eat while waiting for the bigger dishes to come out.

For the cautious eater: kung pao chicken is the safe order and it's done correctly — diced chicken, peanuts, scallions, dried chilis, a sauce that's salty and slightly sweet without the corn-syrupy gloss of a takeout joint. The Mongolian chicken and the chicken curry get specific shout-outs in reviews. "The best food ever," one customer wrote. "We tried the Mongolian Chicken and Chicken Curry, and they were both delicious." Vegetarian options run through the menu — mapo tofu, dry-fried green beans, eggplant in garlic sauce. Beer is on the menu. The dining room takes groups, the kitchen takes phone orders, and curbside pickup is the move on weeknights when the lot fills up.

What This Place Means for South Salt Lake's State Street

South Salt Lake — the city, not the neighborhood — is the unsung middle layer of the Wasatch Front food scene. It's not Sugar House. It's not the Avenues. It's the corridor that runs from Murray to Liberty Park where the rent is workable enough that immigrant-run kitchens can actually open and stay open. Chinese Taste sits in the heart of that strip, two blocks from a Pho 33, a few minutes from a half-dozen Vietnamese, Burmese, and Mexican kitchens that don't get the downtown coverage. The cumulative effect is a State Street that, if you know where to stop, feeds you better than most of the city's tasting-menu corridor.

Salt & Seek has covered the State Street stretch a few times now — the Sichuan moment that hit Utah in 2025 with Zhu Ting Ji and Beijing Restaurant in Sugar House is real, and Chinese Taste was here serving the same flavor profile six years before the food media caught on. The peppercorn buzz that's now in every Utah Stories and City Weekly write-up has been on this menu since opening day. The Yelp reviewer who quoted Gastronomic SLC and inspired Stuart Melling to finally visit was doing the unpaid work of a one-person publicist. That's how Chinese Taste has grown — slowly, on word of mouth, on regulars who pass the name to other regulars.

Planning Your Visit to Chinese Taste

Chinese Taste is at 3424 South State Street, Suite F, Salt Lake City, UT 84115, in the strip mall on the east side of State just south of 3300 South. Phone is (801) 466-0888. Online ordering is on chinesetastetogo.com and via Grubhub and DoorDash. @chinesetaste_utah

Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday — 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday — 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Closed Tuesdays. Worth flagging: the Tuesday closure catches people off guard, so don't drive over on a Tuesday without checking. Dine-in, takeout, curbside, and delivery are all available. Beer and small wine list. Parking is in the strip mall lot — easy on weekdays, tighter on Friday and Saturday nights.

Order the spicy boiled fish if you can handle heat. Order the Chongqing noodles or the Shanxi knife-cut noodles. Get a basket of pork dumplings, four or five lamb skewers off the charcoal BBQ, and a side of sesame balls if you've got room. If you're new to Sichuan peppercorn, mention it to the server — they'll steer you toward dishes that bring the flavor without leveling your face.

This is why we live here. Chinese Taste is the kind of place Salt Lake's food scene runs on — a working strip-mall kitchen that's been quietly serving real Chinese food for almost a decade while the rest of us caught up. If you've never been, the Tuesday-closed catch is the only barrier. Pick a Wednesday, bring three friends, order wide, and let the peppercorn do its work.