- Crocodile Palace's main brick-and-mortar is located at 124 Cochlin St. in Traverse City.
- Their kitchen at The Little Fleet near downtown Traverse City is open year-round, and offers a less spicy menu of options.
Think about the spiciest dish you’ve ever had - maybe it was a tray of hot wings with a little too much sauce. Or a vindaloo curry that was richly flavorful, and a little bit painful.
The sensory experience of spice can create lasting memories around a dish.
Brothers Patrick and Michael Evans, along with fellow chef Ryan Corbin, run Crocodile Palace, a takeout-only Sichuan restaurant in Traverse City, and most of their menu incorporates mala, that notorious spice profile of Sichuan peppercorns and chili oil.
Patrick encourages people to try spicy food that might fall outside of their comfort zone, even if they think they don’t like heat.
“I think that experience is so nice – like, you’ll never forget that, right?” he said.
None of the three chefs grew up in Chinese communities or around Chinese cuisine. But their time in San Francisco’s fine dining scene introduced them to Sichuanese cuisine that they came to love, as well as the skill and knowledge they needed to recreate it.
“There's parallels between everything, right? So it's like, when I taste black vinegar, the first thing that I'm going to compare it to is balsamic…” Patrick said. “You have the technique and the knowledge of cooking, which is all cooking regardless of where you are on the planet.”
On honoring Sichuanese cuisine
Patrick says folks have occasionally commented that Crocodile Palace might draw a bigger crowd if they toned down the spice in some of their hotter dishes. But the team doesn’t plan to do that anytime soon.
“This is how [the dish is] done and that's how it's going to be,” Corbin said. “And if you want something that's not spicy, there are options for that. But this is how it's made.”
The three chefs are “not unaware,” Patrick said, that they are “two white people making Chinese food in northern Michigan.” The team has had several conversations about how they might appeal to the local palette, while staying true to the dishes they’ve learned to recreate.
“I don't want [the food] to be so spicy that it just seems that we're tough...” Patrick said. “But then also, I don't want to dumb it down, because then that's literally all we are, is two white guys in Traverse City, Michigan, making not even close to mediocre Sichuanese food.”
“We want to do the best that we can,” he said. “Part of being a good cook is tasting, and eating, and consistently questioning and learning from tasting those things."
From San Francisco to Traverse City
Patrick and Michael spent several years working in fine dining in San Francisco. For part of that time, Patrick worked at Bar Agricole under Chef Brandon Jew, a James Beard winner whose fine-dining Chinese restaurant, Mister Jiu’s, earned one Michelin star.
Patrick “could get emotional” talking about the things he learned from Jew, he said.
“At Bar Agricole, we were getting some of the most gorgeous produce and proteins and products I've ever seen in my entire life,” he said. “The quality of what you're using is always going to be the most important.”
Patrick and Michael eventually moved back to Michigan where they worked in Traverse City at The Cooks’ House, a chef-owned restaurant known for its focus on local, sustainable, farm-to-table cuisine. It’s also where they met Corbin.
“I had this infatuation with the stories that [Patrick] had of the places that he had cooked,” Corbin said. “I hadn't had the ability to experience those things in a larger city where there's this strong level of competition between the restaurants, [and] between the cooks working at them.”
The three discovered their shared appreciation for Sichuan cuisine, and started experimenting. The chefs tested some of their Sichuan dishes at a popup across the street from The Cooks’ House, and it went really well. So after the pandemic, and after toying with another dining concept that didn’t quite land, they went all-in on the Sichuan concept.
Today, Crocodile Palace has their main brick-and-mortar location tucked next to a convenience store near Northwestern Michigan College. They also have a small kitchen at the Little Fleet, the open-air bar where they held their first popup.
An explanation on The Little Fleet's website states, "Unlike their east side location, not everything with be rooted in spicy szechuan food. You’ll find some fan favorites, but also a menu full of dishes to satisfy everyone. For those of you who crave that addicting ‘ma la’ profile, the menu at their east side location will remain the same, with seasonal changes as always…"
Crocodile Palace’s bestselling dan dan noodles
The menu at the main brick-and-mortar primarily consists of standards like mapo tofu, egg drop soup, pork wontons, crispy pork belly, and fried rice.
The current bestseller is the dan dan noodles. They offer tofu for protein with the noodles, but the recipe works best with pork, Patrick said. Like most dishes at Crocodile Palace, the dan dan noodles feature that combination of numbing Sichuan peppercorns and spicy chili oil.
“When I had [mala] for the first time, I literally thought I was allergic to something…” Patrick said. “Your mouth goes numb.”
The sensations might sound intimidating, but it’s actually kind of genius. That numbing feeling is what allows you to handle the heat of the chili oil.
“It brought it down to a level of like, ‘Oh, I can keep eating this,’” Patrick said. “And it's super enjoyable and addicting.”
The base of Crocodile Palace’s dan dan noodles is, of course, the sauce. The chefs make five quarts of it at a time. There’s a lot of chili oil in each batch – 2,000 grams – but the other ingredients balance it out, Patrick said.
And then there’s the ramen noodles, which cook for just a couple minutes before they’re coated in scallion oil. Finally, this dish is topped off with protein, and diced pickled daikon.
Crocodile Palace at the Little Fleet in Traverse City is open year-round. Their Cochlin location is open Wednesday through Sunday.
