HOT DAMN

Chilispot hits the spot with its fire-and-tingle brand of Sichuan fare

BY FAIYAZ KARA

You wouldn’t think that a restaurant with the conventional name of “Chilispot” — one that enthralled Columbus and, more recently, beguiled Mound City (that’s St. Louis, in case you were wondering) — would end up serving some of the best Sichuan fare in Orlando, but hot damn, Chilispot does just that. This isn’t a place that peppercorns just for the sake of peppercorning, either — it numbs with intent, and dazzles in the process.

So when a server came by within seconds of us being seated and placed a bowl of soup on our table, we naturally assumed it to be a liquid combustible. “It’s sweet!” said one of my dining comrades after sipping the warm liquid. The clear, almost gelatinous broth was reminiscent of egg-drop soup, but scented with osmanthus flower and textured with small, colorful, sticky balls of sesame and fruit-flavored mochi. It’s also a Chinese New Year staple. “You have to eat it all for good luck,” said our server, so eat it all we did.

Seemed to have worked too, at least in the immediate future, because we lucked out with our menu choices. Chopsticking slippery-when-wet Sichuan wontons ($8.95) slicked in roasted red chili oil into our mouths rolled lucky sevens into our eyeballs. The sturdy, tender skins on those dump- lings were matched only by the flavor of the ground pork filling. That same filling, along with bok choy and scallions, was heaped atop Chengdu dandan noodles ($8.95) that another dining pal was quick to toss the moment the bowl was set before us. Just as the slurping ensued, in came a plate of cumin lamb ($18). Granted, it’s a Xinjiang delicacy popularized by Uyghurs in the autono mous territory in northwest China, but every Chinese restaurant, Sichuan or otherwise, seems to offer the dish. The version here is pow er-packed with peppers and peppercorns, scented with ginger, garlic and onions, and almost as good the day after as it was the day of. Meaty spareribs ($19.95), barely perceptible beneath an avalanche of peanuts, tien tsin chilies, green peppers, sesame seeds and tongue-tasing peppercorns, are the sort that give purpose to gnawing.

If there was a quibble, it was with the rice; it wasn’t as sticky as we hoped it would be. “It’s a bit dry,” said my pal, who then immediately seg ued into, “Oh my God, look at the size of this

Chilispot

4646 S. Kirkman Road 407-730-3533 chilispotusa.com thing!” And with that unexpected utterance, talk of water-to-rice ratios all but evaporated into the steam billowing up from a gurgling stone pot that took up a sizable portion of real estate on our table. Inside this witch’s cauldron ($49.95) lay slivers of beef bathed in what was surely the devil’s lubricant, sesame-specked, potato’d and heaped with cilantro for illusory effect only. What lay in its dark, piping-hot depths was fire, absolute fire. Consider the dish my new flame (though I will say the stone pot jumping with frogs’ legs had my eye wandering). fkara@orlandoweekly.com

“Got a fish dish you recommend?” we asked, and owner Vincent Go shot us a look: “That’s a lot of food!” Hey, we’re junkies for this stuff. Go suggested the fish with pickle soup ($19.95). Pickle soup? Oh, he’s letting us down easy after this inferno, I thought to myself. But I nevertheless spooned up the chunks of swai fish and quite enjoyed the vinegary kick. Then came the burn. Yeah, Go got the last laugh.

For dessert, we dug into a pepper-free sweet ice jelly ($3.95) with candied hawthorn, nuts and what looked like goji berries, while Go chatted with us about plans he has for the restaurant. He says he’s aiming for a clientele demographic of 60 percent Chinese to 40 percent non-Chinese. On this night, it was more like 90-10. I wonder about that old restaurant trope, you know the one — if most people inside a Chinese restaurant are Chinese, then it’s got to be a good; if most people aren’t Chinese, then it must suck. That thinking really applies to any so-called “ethnic” restaurant, but is it valid? Perhaps, but in Orlando’s third-culture restaurant landscape, maybe the notion isn’t as true as it once was.