Has anyone had the chance to visit Spicy Impression yet? It has received many positive reviews on China’s largest social media platform, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book/小红书). Several people from Chongqing mentioned that the style is Chongqing cuisine. Just wondering what do people on this website think of it 
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W: I was impressed. Every dish was well above average. The best dish we ate was the snakehead fish in pickled pepper sauce. Worth the drive.
P: We decided to try it out ourselves😊. While I can’t handle very spicy dishes, I found the spice level manageable as long as I avoided the dried and fresh chilies. I enjoyed the flavors of the food and noticed that it was lighter on salt, oil, and seasoning compared to other Sichuan restaurants in LA. We also noticed that this restaurant uses less numbing Sichuan pepper than others, like Chengdu Taste. Curious, we asked the staff if their cuisine was Chengdu or Chongqing style, and they explained that it is actually Zigong style, a regional cuisine from Sichuan that is more similar to Chongqing.
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What’s the dish in the last pic?
It’s listed on the menu as “Chinese Sweet Rice Cake with Brown Sugar (8 for $9.99)”. We both really liked it. I recently tried a similar dish at another Sichuan restaurant, Meizhou Dongpo (name after the Meizhou area in Sichuan) in Arcadia (see the pictures from Yelp below). I prefer the version from Spicy Impression tonight, as it’s softer, with a better brown sugar-to-rice cake ratio and a richer, tastier flavor.
This is the Meizhou Dongpo’s version:
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I’ve also seen versions of this dish at Sichuan Impression and Lao Ma Tou.
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Peony: I spoke with my friends from Sichuan, and they were surprised that I found the food mild and not very spicy. They had heard that Spicy Impression serves bold-flavored dishes, and Zigong, known for its salt production, typically offers even bolder food than Chengdu. Even though we mostly ordered vegetable dishes, which are typically less spicy, they should still have been quite salty.
They may have toned it down because Warrior isn’t Chinese 
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Warrior: I found the food spicy. I certainly wouldn’t describe it as “mild.” LOL. Not too spicy though. What I liked about all the dishes is that they tasted balanced. I felt that the food had less sichuan pepper / numbing / ma than a lot of Sichuan places in the SGV, which I liked. Too much sichuan pepper makes dishes taste bitter. I affirmatively dislike some dishes, like the mung bean jelly appetizer at Chengdu Taste, because of this.
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To me, it’s bitter because of the amount of vinegar. Some places use a light touch on the liang fen, others drown it.
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Hmmm…maybe.
Vinegar is sour (from acetic acid), not usually bitter (which comes from phenols, peptides, alkaloids, and various other things).
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