Grand Delusion

Although it's not something that I do all the time, I have an occasional hankering to embark on a truly sadistic food mission. Some of you might recall how this led to my consumption of lamb testicles. Others might have heard my swagger about, at some point, eating balut. But those who know me the best know that my preferred method of joyful self punishment is spicy, spicy food.

Some spicy food, I'll admit, is just a gimmick -- so-called "suicidal" buffalo wings, for instance. Others, like a Thai jungle curry or a vindaloo, really suffer without the heat. And still others seem like a sick joke, but end up becoming a perennial favorite. I put Sichuan hot pot and that last category.

To be honest, I'm inclined to agree with the notion that you can't get a proper Sichuan dish in Manhattan. Once you've had the blissful tongue-numbing chicken salad at Flushing's Spicy and Tasty, for instance, the stuff around Canal Street starts to look a little pale. But there are moments when you don't have it in you to make the two-hour round-trip to the end of the 7 line, and Grand Sichuan (the one in Chinatown, at least) turns out to be a distant but acceptable runner-up.

The main dishes there tend to run about $9, including the twice-cooked pork that our waitress recommended. It was essentially pork belly, scallions, and green bell peppers cooked in chili oil. Although it's certainly hard to mess up pork belly, I was sorry that the dish did not have the distinctive tingle you get from proper Sichuan peppercorns.

The hot pot, on the other hand, did not disappoint.

For those of you who haven't had a Chinese hot pot experience, here is how it basically works. You start with a large pot of broth that remains boiling over a gas burner. Then you put various meats and vegetables in it, let it cook in the broth, and eat the cooked goodies and broth together.

At Grand Sichuan, they give you the option of picking a mild chicken-based broth, or a spicy pepper-based broth. You can even get the two side-by-side. We opted for just the pepper-based broth, to the surprise (and amusement, perhaps) of our waitress, the other waitresses, the other customers, and (most likely) the kitchen staff. We figured that if we were going to go down, we would go down swinging.

What we ended up with was about 2 quarts of bubbling soup spiked with about 50 chili peppers. It looked like someone had just melted a ball of red wax. It looked like stomach cancer in a bowl. It looked like the devil's soul. As soon as I had my first sip of the broth, I knew that I would be facing a serious case of hot hole tomorrow.

But it was worth it. By the time you're half way through the hot pot (they charge you by the topping, by the way -- veggies tend to be under $5, while meet tends to be about $7 -- and two toppings per person is more than enough, even if you're hungry), you start to feel a little high. As we made our way through to dish, we realized that a lot of the pain was not from the spiciness itself, but because the high temperature of the hot pot intensified the spice so that it felt much worse (or much better). I'm pretty sure that, by the end, my body was pumping more endorphins through me than blood.

Grand Sichuan
125 Canal St. @ Bowery just north of the Manhattan Bridge (map)
(212) 625-9212