Good Sichuanese food at Tian Fu Chinese Restaurant is at 4771 Steeles Ave East, hard by the Pacific Mall (massive Asian shopping mall, apparently the largest outside of Asia) and as close as you ever really want to get to Markham in your life. Yes, this is a soulless, technocratic suburban district shot through with eight-lane thoroughfares seeming to function mainly as parking lots for the choicest Mercs, BMWs, Audis and Lexi that the wealthy of China deign to drive once they settle in from their trans-Pacific flights, but what you gonna do? With Chinese food being a universe unto itself, just Sichuanese food alone could by any standard be judged a national cuisine ranking favourably among your French and your Italian cooking types, and these people do it really well, so it's worth the trip.
Sichuanese food is spicy. Here are four standouts that my wife and I really enjoyed tonight.
Counterclockwise, from the top:
1. Stir-fried pea shoots. The garlic and oil was sublime tonight, with a faintly buttery tang of beguilingly delicate subtlety. This is one of those dishes that tastes good and is damned good for you, too.
2.
Gongbao jiding. Standard Sichuanese chicken dish with peanuts and dried chilies. The sauce was a bit sweeter than we might have liked, but it was still good.
3.
Fuqi feipian. Literally "husband-wife lung slices," though not literally slices from the lungs of cash-strapped couples forced to carve up their breathing apparati once they've sold off their spare kidneys. No, this is a cold dish of paper-thin slices of beef and tripe swimming in spicy oil. It's literally to die for (not "literally" literally, just literally).
4.
Qingjiao feichang. "Pork intestine with green pepper." Really nice spicy heat with this one, and the intestine was cooked to perfection. It's really important for it not to be rubbery, as that would be unpleasant (like bad calamari, by analogy).
More than anything else in the world, Chinese people fear food that is dry in texture, and that goes double for the 100 million-plus ethnic Sichuanese, for whom no dish is right until it is glistening in spicy oil. Like in the photo. The concept of an Italian style sandwich consisting of some really nice salami and a slice of cheese on a bun is utterly foreign to them. One of the worst things you can say about some food to a Chinese person is that it's too dry.
Me, though, I like both kinds.
All kinds.
Confusingly, the restaurant used to be called "Ba Shu Ren Jia" (巴蜀人家), and while it still actually does say that in Chinese on the sign, there seems to be another "Ba Shu Ren Jia" in Mississauga now. Did the original people move to Mississauga? Was there some kind of rift? I have no idea what the story is.
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Me and my husband has been eating a lot of it lately cause of its great taste.
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