Ragged ribbons of fatty beef, lush and vanishing on the tongue, run through suan tang fei niu, a profoundly sour soup. Each spoonful is a ratchet up in sourness: pickled chiles declaring themselves in the depths, along with pickled garlic, pickled cabbage and a generous slosh of rice vinegar.
The soup is laced with huajiao, Sichuan peppercorns, both green, for fragrance, and red, for flavor. These aren’t hot — that’s the job of the chiles — but floral, and both bring a prickling to the lips, like the snap of an electric current. Still, neither is present in enough force to leave you numb.
(Nothing I’ve eaten here, or anywhere in New York, has been as humbling as the Sichuan food I had a few months ago in Shanghai. There, it felt as if I were being kissed by a horde of invisible bees. And that, a friend from Chengdu insisted, was a pale shadow of what you find in Sichuan.)
At Chuan Tian Xia, mala — Sichuan’s distinct marriage of tingling huajiao and incendiary chiles, numbing force and feral heat — is only one shade of the meal. With every bite, you start to speak a complicated language of salt and smoke; lancing sourness; sweet never without its partner, bitter. You breathe garlic.
“There’s complimentary mouthwash,” one of my companions announced on a return from the restroom. We laughed, because what good would it do? And kept eating.
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