The Sichuan dish called “sauerkraut fish” might not appeal to many folks unfamiliar with the more agreeable Mandarin term, suancai yu, or the dish itself, a bowl of tender whitefish in a slightly sour broth made from pickled mustard greens.

Typically prepared with filets of grass carp, snakehead, basa, or flounder and enriched with ginger and garlic, plus the pickled vegetables that give the soup its sourness, the soup is considered one of Chongqing’s top 10 classic dishes. But despite its popularity, suancai yu isn’t found on that many of the Chinese restaurant menus around Baltimore, which tend to favor shuizhu yu (Sichuan water-boiled fish), the version charged with either Sichuan green peppercorns or a mind-blowing amount of red chiles.

Lucky for us, this changed recently, with the July opening of Fish With You in Ellicott City. It is the first Maryland location of a wildly popular suancai yu chain that first launched in Beijing in 2017 and that now boasts more than 2,500 shops worldwide, spanning from Brooklyn in New York City and a few in Los Angeles, to Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Dubai.

Fish With You is a cheerful, tidy place, with Orioles-orange chairs, a flatscreen displaying gorgeous bowls of soup, a giant orange blow-up fish as a kind of inanimate concierge, plus hand-held fish-shaped fans for those choosing spicier items on the menu—also helpful in summer heatwaves.

A row of rice cookers is stationed near the counter, ensuring that your bowls of the rice that traditionally accompanies the soups—either basic white or the blissful charcoal-colored combination of barley/peanuts/black rice—are delivered warm. And the small tables each sport drawers filled with napkins and chopsticks. It’s a remarkably cozy set-up.

Then there’s the sauerkraut soup itself, which, it should be said, comes in a bowl the size of a hubcap. This is standard: The bowls of shuizhu yu at both NiHao and Lao Sze Chuan are massive, as they are at Red Pepper Sichuan Bistro and its sister restaurants, Orient Express and Tea Horse, all three of which have not only shuizhu yu but excellent iterations of suancai yu.

At Fish With You, the soup is made with ribbons of snakehead, which is a nice touch for locals who are familiar with the invasive but delicious fish. Snakehead is indigenous to China, so it’s traditionally used in soups. And it’s splendid here, tender and mild enough to play off nicely against the broth’s sourness. The soup is both spiced and decorated with a restrained amount of crimson chiles and a center pile of thinly sliced scallions and threaded not only with pickled greens but with nearly invisible glass noodles. A pretty dusting of sesame seeds finishes things off.

There are other variations of suancai yu on the glossy menu, made with tomatoes, additional Sichuan peppercorns—there were once garnishing sprigs of fresh Sichuan peppercorns, too, but apparently the restaurant can’t import them anymore—red chiles, lemons, scallion broth, or basa (a freshwater catfish) rather than snakehead. There are additional items: beef soup, fried pork soup, Taiwanese sausage, grilled squid skewers, plus desserts (coconut lava balls, glutinous rice cakes), teas, and many, many add-ons for your bowls, should your soup require quail eggs, say, or enoki mushrooms.

With a friendly atmosphere and all those wonderful soups, Fish With You is a splendid addition to Baltimore National Pike’s strip-mall restaurant row. And for a region with a longtime love for sauerkraut, it seems natural, even inevitable, to have a restaurant devoted to the Sichuan bowls. No, it’s not the same as what Baltimoreans grew up eating at Thanksgiving, but it somehow feels right at home.

FISH WITH YOU: 10040 Baltimore National Pike, Ellicott City, 443-816-3737. HOURS: Sun.-Thurs. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.
PRICES: Soups: $14.95-17.95; appetizers: $3.95-6.95; mains: $12.95 26.95; desserts: $6.95. AMBIANCE: Cheery food court.

It is an article of faith that some of the best and often unheralded food can be found in strip malls. So it was not surprising recently to find an excellent Sichuan noodle shop just off Route 40 in Ellicott City, next to a dentist’s office, at the side of a parking lot the size of a lacrosse field.

Pepper House, open since April 2021, is the first restaurant from a couple with no background in the restaurant industry but a great love of traditional Chinese food. Yuan Shen, who is from Hunan, runs the front of the house, while her husband, Frank Liang, is the chef. Liang is a native of Chongquing, a sprawling city in southwestern China known for its fiercely spicy noodle bowls, in this case packed with bok choy, scallions, a golden-yellow egg, and plenty of house-made chile oil (glorious stuff that you can—and certainly should—buy by the jar).

The menu is a highly curated one of noodles both with and without soup, various dry pot and hot pot dishes called “malatang,” dumplings, a few hot dishes (the crispy fish is excellent), and some smaller cold dishes (“mouth watering” chicken, mung-bean jelly). Most of the dishes are doused with chiles in one form or another, and many are charged with the Sichuan pepper corns that produce the numbing effect called “mala.”

That said, thanks to Liang’s deft touch in the kitchen, the food is not overwhelmed by heat but by flavor. Surprisingly, Liang was not trained in food but in music: A professional opera singer, he still teaches students, who come to the restaurant to take classes. And, when the restaurant isn’t busy, he plays the piano that sits against the wall in the small dining room, sometimes accompanying himself. (A tenor, he’s fond of Pavarotti.)

The small restaurant, which was previously an office, is arranged around two communal tables and a counter, atop which sits a huge glass vat of that house chile oil, like beautiful crimson artwork.

Laminated menus display one side in English, the other in Mandarin. There’s also another menu with dishes that
take longer to make—Mongolian lamb, sour cabbage duck soup, braised pork belly—and can be ordered ahead for parties or feasts.

The thin, wheat noodles that fill the various bowls come from a New York vendor; they’re supple and chewy, the perfect foil for the soups and sauces. Along with the Chongquing noodles, Liang makes a terrific Chengdu iteration of dan dan noodles, a popular dish he prepares with pork and both dried and pickled greenery and is meant to be well-mixed before consumption—something that Shen often sees to herself, shortly after delivering the bowls.

The dumplings are also unusually good: Hefty, pork-filled, and topped with the house chile oil, they’re a dream version of the wontons invariably found on Chinese menus.

“Chile sauce and mala are the soul of Sichuan cooking,” says Shen, who notes that, when she and her husband were first working to open their restaurant, they ignored friends who advised them to offer American-Chinese dishes rather than traditional Chinese fare.

We are so very glad they did.

PEPPER HOUSE: 10176 Baltimore National Pike, Ste. 105, Ellicott City, 410-418-8866. HOURS: Tues.-Sun. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. PRICES: Noodles: $13.99-15.99; fried rice, hot pots and main dishes: $13.99-19.99.