Red Chilli Restaurant: Sichuan Spice, DIY Style in Sydney
Responsible, in part, for Sydney’s craze for the fiery cuisine of Sichuan, China, is the Red Chilli restaurant group, a miniature empire of five traditional Sichuan restaurants. Focused on the recipes of the southwestern China province, Red Chilli restaurants are famous for their mouth-burning, tongue-tingling meat and seafood dishes, and, with the addition of their Glebe outlet, their mastery of the time-honoured Sichuan hotpot, known as huo guo.
Hotpot dining is a traditional affair, and Red Chilli restaurant beautifully sets the scene, with a regally decorated room, ornately carved chairs, red lanterns and evocative artwork. Each of the low-slung dining tables is equipped with an industrial-strength gas burner, where the cauldron-sized brass hotpot is set on an open flame.
First though, there are some sensational starters: Sichuan pork-and-cabbage dumplings with vinegar are fragrant and flavourful, and the crispy spring-onion pancake goes a treat paired with a selection of sauces. Dandan noodles are classic Sichuan, swimming in peppery red sauce and topped with minced pork-and-sesame paste.
Hotpot novices may find that the course itself is a slightly confusing, challenging and wonderfully entertaining form of dining, best shared among a small group of enthusiastic diners. Rather than a menu, a diner is handed a shopping list of ingredients. Start by selecting your broth – either a spicy chilli soup, a mild chicken-and-pork stock or the half-half hotpot. The mild and the spicy soups are divided down the middle like yin and yang – a pale, saintly stock beside a fiery hell broth. If you order the spicy, you also can choose the level of spiciness, and the degree of numbness (the amount of Sichuan peppercorns used). Go higher than "medium" for those grades and the chilli will be genuinely eye-watering, and the potent peppercorn flavour overwhelming.
Also, don’t be tempted to order too much: portions are generous, and having too many different ingredients cooking at once can become overly complicated. You’ll have to figure out the cooking times for individual ingredients yourself – tricky at first, but all part of the fun of DIY restaurant dining.
Meaty treats for your bubbling broth include slices of lamb, beef and pork belly as well as an assortment of offal including pork kidneys and duck tongues. There are fish balls bursting with roe inside; scallops, catfish fillets and fresh, live seafood selections including baby abalone. Mix things up a bit with slippery, sweet potato noodles, pork wontons and quail eggs.
A wide selection of vegetables and fungi includes mustard greens, oyster mushrooms and slices of white radish that sponge up the delicious flavours of the hotpot broth after a good few minutes’ soaking.
Red Chilli restaurant provides one of the most fun and filling Chinese meals around, and paired with jasmine tea and Tsingtao beer, the lingering hot and numbing sensations are a joy to savour.
Posted on Jan 13, 2011 by Fiona Davies
