15 Leigh Street, London WC1 (020 7383 3135). Meal for two, including tea and service £45
"I am sweating, my hearing's going and the top of my head is pulsing!'' My companion has a note of panic in his voice. Our main courses have arrived before the starters and – crucially – before our bowls of cooling rice. He starts sneezing and anxiously scans the room for a waiter. "We ordered tea, starters and plain rice?" he pleads. "Yeah," she smiles reassuringly as she plonks another bowl of fiery red meat on our table.
There is a careful structure in Sichuan cooking, with cooler dishes building to warmer, meatier, spicier mains (they don't do desserts). But at Chilli Cool in London's Kings Cross there are two cafés and two kitchens next door to each other and it seems the main-course kitchen is faster (the other does hotpots and appetisers for both).
So we'd started with "sliced beef Sichuan style lavishly topped". I think it was the "lavishly topped" that swung it for me. That and the fact that the Chinese group at the neighbouring table was happily tucking into theirs. If, like me, you are too easily persuaded that the Chinese restaurant with the most Chinese faces must be the best, then Chilli Cool is for you. But this is no Cantonese Chinatown crowd. This is a younger Bloomsbury clientele, largely drawn, I suspect, from the School of Oriental and African Studies not far from here, though we are still the only people speaking English.
Our beef swims, or more accurately drowns, in a sea of rusty red oil. "The meat tastes sweaty, tripey, intestiney," says my seriously alarmed companion who now wishes he was eating anywhere else. But a trawl around the bottom of the bowl reveals a pile of spring greens and bean sprouts whose slightly bitter crunch transforms the textures from mildly unpleasant to interesting.
Next up, our "sea spicy shredded pork" arrives. This is the most famous of the Sichuan "fish fragrant" dishes and for the first time my companion begins to relax. The scared squint around his eyes starts to recede. This is a wonderfully complex and accomplished plate of food, though trying to discern all the flavour sensations is like a Masterchef taste test. They are all here: sweet, sour, spicy, salty. The slippery black strips are fungus ("agaric", according to our waiter). Bamboo shoots add bite to the tender meat. Sichuan peppers bring lip-tingling, almost flowery notes. But it is in the oil where all the competing noises are contained and tamed, providing a background hum where the flavours swim together.
The dry fried beans usually come with minced pork, but we had asked for the vegetarian option. It didn't disappoint – the beans were puckered but still moist inside.
Then, almost too late, our starters appear. Aubergine with red and green chop chilli consists of room-temperature, scarcely cooked vegetable scattered with sesame seeds and dressed with (you guessed it) warm red oil. The aubergine is fruity, almost appley, and gently spicy. The fresh chilli slices add a strangely subtle sour element. But the star starter is the cold sliced pork belly with mashed garlic sauce. Here, wafer-thin slices of luscious soft, fatty meat come with cool cucumber. "Refreshing and summery," says my amazed companion, now visibly content, as though pork belly marinating in a big bowl of chilli oil could almost be a breezy summer salad.
We have eaten well, with four generous dishes (some of the other tables are packing their leftovers in takeaway boxes), good rice and endless cups of Chinese tea for £45. This is not the place to go if you are a fussy eater, someone put off by spice, fat, or nose-to-tail eating: tendons, tripe, ears, "pigs red" (blood in China but not in Britain, apparently) all appear on the menu. But in an area dominated by homogenous high-steet eateries, Chilli Cool offers real cooking at near-café prices. Even my faint-hearted companion can't wait till the weather cools and the hotpot season kicks in.
