Christmas at Barshu Restaurant

The food of Sichuan province in southwest China is one of the world’s great cuisines. Its most famous characteristic is its fiery spiciness, which comes from the liberal use of chillies and lip-tingling Sichuan pepper. But hot and spicy is only part of the story. Sichuanese chefs are legendary for their ability to combine many different tastes into exquisite complex flavours. Some of these are robustly spicy, while others are delicate and teasing. And the use of chillies is so inventive that their taste never palls. In China, they say the variety of flavours used in Sichuanese cuisine is so dazzling that ‘each one of a hundred dishes will have its own, unique taste’.