I thought I could take the pain.
Kevin P. Casey
Note: Bowls in photo are deeper than they appear.
Kevin P. Casey
The dry-pot lamb, bubbling away.
Location Info
Details
Spiced: Truly Chinese Cuisine 1299 156th Ave. N.E., Bellevue, 425-644-8888. Open for lunch and dinner, Tues.–Sun.
Price Check
3 appetizers $5.99
Chonqing chicken $10.99
Green beans $7.99
Pea shoots $12.99
Sichuan fish $14.99
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The ratio of dried red chiles to meat on the plate of Chongqing chicken at Bellevue's Spiced: Truly Chinese Cuisine was only about 1:2, but the dish was a warning that Spiced takes both halves of its name seriously. As many restaurants do, Spiced uses red-pepper icons on its menu to signal the heat of a dish, and on the first two pages—its Sichuan specialties—the margins look like they're decorated with New Mexican ristras.
The sight of all that red in the Chongqing chicken (a three-pepper dish) didn't bother me. Chiles are often used for fragrance as much as heat in Sichuan dishes, and any pepper pieces that clung to the dime-sized chunks of meat were easy to brush off. But after three or four of the crunchy chunks, very lightly breaded and flecked with sesame seeds, my mouth started buzzing, my entire body seemed to turn Hello Kitty pink, and I had to reach for the rice bowl for relief. It wasn't the peppers I could see that got me. It was the ones I couldn't.
There are two main types of spicy in Chinese food. La is capsaicin spicy, the one we're most familiar with, that prickles, warms, and hurts. But then there's ma spicy—a peculiar buzzy, numbing feeling that comes from Sichuan peppercorns (aka prickly ash buds). Sichuan chefs like to combine the two for shock and awe; as the owner of a Sichuan restaurant in the Bay Area once told me, "We use the Sichuan peppercorns to numb the mouth so we can make the food even hotter"—the equivalent of doing a line of coke in the bathroom in order to finish off a keg. It turned out that the oil the meat was fried in had been spiked with Sichuan peppercorns, too. As I kept eating Spiced's Chongqing chicken, alternating it with pieces of meltingly tender Sichuan-style fish poached in oil redolent of toasted chiles and garlic, I put off all thoughts of tomorrow and dove into the hurt.
Only when my stomach started cramping was it time to concede defeat.
Spiced opened two months ago next door to the Crossroads Mall, and was quickly picked up by the Chinese-foodie telephone tree. The dining room, crowded every night, buzzes with Mandarin. According to the waitstaff, the chef comes from Chongqing, a city renowned throughout China for its blunt, incendiary food. And if you pay close attention to the plates on the tables of Chinese diners, you'll spot that most of their food is bright, bright red.
The restaurant got discovered so quickly that the strain shows on the waitstaff, some of whom look almost panic-stricken as they sprint through the aisle. They're not quite sure what to do with their non-Chinese clientele, either. The waiter on my third visit was a befuddled galoot who, among other things, didn't alert us to the fact that the dumplings we'd ordered from the appetizer menu were actually desserts and forgot one of the entrées. During our second meal, an affably patronizing waitress stopped by to comment on how rare it was for Americans to be eating spicy food, recommending milder dishes for us the next time.
But on my first visit, I was lucky enough to encounter the waiter who most wants to bring his customers into the fold. If you don't speak Mandarin, you want to call over the compact, muscular guy in his 30s wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Maybe it was partly because when he arrived I was mowing my way through a heap of sliced pig ear from the appetizer case, but he started the night by explaining Spiced's menu—properly.
First, he had us turn to the first major spread in the menu, the one with all the pepper icons on it. "All Sichuan restaurants offer these types of dishes," he said, pointing to the right side, which listed four different preparations—pickled peppers, green chiles, boiled with chiles, and chopped chiles—each with various meats. "And this list," he said, pointing to the Chef's Specialty column on the left, "is the dishes unique to this restaurant." He mentioned that frog (live until ordered!) and lamb were Spiced's signature meats, and divulged that his favorite dish was actually the "lamb in dry pot" hidden on the next page. It was the best thing we ate over the course of my three visits.
The "dry pot" turned out to be a shallow silver wok set above an alcohol flame. Snipped red chiles interlaced with threads of green Chinese celery covered the surface, and underneath we could hear the burbling of chile oil and broth. I plucked out pieces of lamb, immeasurably tender, as well as shavings of fried garlic and ginger, sturdy bean sprouts, and caramelized onions. The cool, floral crunch of the Chinese celery, set against the flush of heat and spice, proved the genius of the dish: It was like a well-placed joke mid-diatribe.
Three meals at Spiced were hardly enough to work through the menu—hell, it'd take 10 to get a general idea. But here's my advice on how to take it on.
