This city restaurant's signature dish has been served 100,000 times

Sydney Morning Herald

4 days ago

Previous SlideNext Slide
There's a famous Chinese tongue twister that cab drivers in China love to repeat. It's about chilli, a point of pride and fierce regional conjecture in China's central provinces.
People from Sichuan, it goes, do not fear chilli. People from Hunan province? They're not afraid of the stuff either. People from Guizhou province, however, they just fear the meal won't be hot enough.
Queen Street in the CBD might not spring to mind when you think of regional Chinese food, but it's home to a restaurant that cooks the food of those first two provinces – plus a little from neighbouring Hubei – to a rare standard. Red Cliff is named for a military battle that took place on the Yangtze, the river that connects the kitchen's three schools of cooking, in 208AD.
Given the restaurant's fondness for both the lip-frazzling bedlam of the Sichuan peppercorn and the thrilling hostility of Hunan's army of chillies, those Guizhou folks have nothing to fear here.
Some, myself included, do like it hot. But if chilli isn't your jam, you're still in safe hands. It's the dazzling clarity and sheer vitality in the cooking that distinguishes Red Cliff from its contemporaries, and both turn up in the food irrespective of the heat. Canary-yellow fish soups that run wild with pickled cabbage and chicken broth. Twice-cooked pork belly enriched with fermented bean paste and tossed with spring onion. Dry-fried swimmer crabs piled high and spiced with abandon.
Red Cliff is packed every night. Chancing a walk-in, we take a number and are off the street and into a crisp Tsingtao lager in 10 minutes. Cue the sensory assault: ruby red walls covered with cartoon princesses from bygone dynasties. Hanging yellow and red lanterns; tubular glazed roof tiles – the ones you might associate with ancient temples – tracing the ceiling. The thrum of a full room rising and falling with every bubbling delivery from the kitchen, and, crucially, the aching refrains of 'pao mo', an evergreen Chinese torch song.
The Chinese term 'renao', a sort of lively rambunctiousness, springs to mind – an ingredient as critical to central Chinese hospitality as the Sichuan peppercorn itself. It's also commonly found at the bottom of a bottle of baijiu, China's notorious, sorghum-based spirit. There's plenty of it here, just ask the gentlemen in the private dining room.
'This is food that widens eyes and incites hubbub. Food that makes you want to slap backs and spill beer in the private dining room.'
Ordering happens either by QR code or by the enormous physical menu; a laminated broadsheet filled, for the largest part, with food from Sichuan, followed by Hunan, followed by Hubei, plus a Peking duck that might've lost its way while making south for the winter.
If you happen to read hanzi, a closer inspection of those hanging lanterns reveals the names of some of the restaurant's most popular dishes: wok-tossed bullfrog; sauteed chicken with hot chilli and peppercorn; chou 'stinky' tofu; yabby noodles.
You'll spot those dishes on most tables (the tofu will announce itself on the breeze), but those yabbies are the stuff of legend and have reportedly been served over 100,000 times. Order them mala-style (heavy on the Sichuan peppercorn), order them Hunan-spicy (a straighter, hotter heat), or have them rolled about in a blend of 13 spices. Either way, they'll be ladled generously over wheat noodles; a saucy signature.
The Zigong-style chilli beef, billed as a two-chilli dish in a four-chilli rubric, is hot. But it's also heaven: a fortissimo of Christmas-coloured chillies, coins of pickled ginger, garlic spanked to shards, coriander, celery and tender marinated beef. It's a maximalist's dream, and there's a hell of a lot of it.
Hotter still, Hunanese mainstay lei lajiao pidan, or smashed peppers with century eggs salad, arrives in a mortar, unsmashed. We're instructed to pound the blistered green chillies – sweet, ruinously hot – with the eggs by way of pestle. Their whites now a translucent green, the eggs temper the vicious heat with a cooling funk that also gives the dish its dimension.
Still burning? Temper it further with a bing fen, a Sichuanese street dessert that presents like Chinese scroggin served over jelly and red-sugar syrup; a gentle way to finish after a full-throttle session.
Red Cliff is a lot. This is food that widens eyes and incites hubbub. Food that makes you want to slap backs and spill beer in the private dining room. Food that makes you want to 'gan bei!' your baijiu and prosecute flimsy arguments until your lips stop fizzing.
Sure, the service is curt and the toilets aren't flash. Sure, there is that trolley of splattered dishes next to the counter for all to see. But it's all part of the renao – the beating heart of a central Chinese meal that makes Red Cliff appointment dining, whether you like it hot or not.