Golden Szechaun Restaurant - Saanich

This is a bright clean restaurant. Prices vary from very high to moderate and the menus has a vast selection of dishes. I quite enjoyed the stir fried tofu and greens along with a bowl of rice. The sauce was mild and added a very nice subtle flavour to the dish. Service was good.

I walked into this restaurant and was asked what kind of tea I would like, so I told the waiter the name of the tea. I was then handed a menu and as I flipped I found that a pot of tea was between $6 to $7. I was thinking may be it was only for certain specialty tea. So I asked the waiter when he dropped off the pot of tea and he confirmed that yes it's $7. I dropped my jaw. Some Chinese dim sum restaurants charge $1 to $2 per person for tea but for this "special" restaurant they charge per pot. If you come with a big group that's probably ok. If you come by yourself just for a $10 lunch and paying $7 for tea its absurd! The waiter said even for dinner they also charge the same amount for the tea. I am 99% sure none of other Chinese restaurants charge for tea for dinner. Well I was told to bring my own tea or just ask for water next time. But this tea charge was not disclosed to me when I sat down. It's a rip off to me. Next time? No next time. There are too many restaurant options in Richmond.Food quality - fried noodles were too greasy but the taste was good and noodles were quite chewy, The pork with soup small steam buns had very thick skin that I didn't eat the skin.

Golden Szechuan is in an uninspiring building in Richmond near the airport. Inside it's nice in the way that lots of Chinese restaurants are decorated throughout North America. But the food is something special. It has been hard to find good spicy Szechuan food, in Vancouver, but this made us really happy. They packed our chicken dish - just as requested - with dry roasted chiles and we stuffed ourselves on that and green beans. Amazing.The only drawback is the price. It's definitely not cheap, especially since it's in Richmond, far from Vancouver.

For anyone who likes spicy dishes, this is one of the very best places in Richmond. Not overwhelmingly hot, but hot. Just tell them you like it hot like genuine Sichuan style otherwise they tone it down for "gringos".

Food was good but service was downright horrible. Took forever to get our order, once we did the food came all at once in record time and then the service disappeared after that. Ordered a beer which never arrived although they charged me for it. Ordered water which never arrived. Tried to order something else which we could not because nobody paid any attention. The restaurant had 4 customer tables with about 4 wait staff, you'd think someone would notice. Left hungry because we could not get any service to order anything else. What we had was good, too bad I'll never get to taste anything else here again.