Last weekend we decided to go to Hot Space; no, not a description of the current state of the West Philippine Sea, but the name of a hole-in-the-wall Sichuan restaurant on Makati Avenue.
What we know as Chinese food, which is mostly Cantonese food, no longer seems alien to us, but Sichuan food does; it’s so different from the southeastern cuisine that it might as well be from another country.

Hot Space joins LSQ and Panda Kitchenette as one of the places with which you can winnow your real foodie friends from the mere poseurs.
The jaunt is something of an adventure, and the food is unrelentingly spicy, not in an unrelenting battering of Scoville units but applied judiciously, in the double punch known as ma-là (hot-numbing), a combination of chilies and the nerve-tingling effect of Sichuan peppercorns.

The interiors are sparse, and you climb the stairs to get to an expansive dining area and two banquet rooms. The speciality is hotpot, often oddly called a “steamboat,” or, locally, as “shabu-shabu”

Favorite dishes

The bad news is that the hotpot menu is only in Chinese, so you will have to rely on the help of the waitstaff, who are obliging but not very knowledgeable.

We decided to have our favorite Sichuanese dishes instead. The menu, for better or for worse, had gone through the maddening meat grinder of language that is Google Translate, and so we spent some time trying to decipher what each dish was supposed to be.

I loved it; it was reminiscent of some of the best moments of travelling, when you sit down at a table in a foreign restaurant and have no idea what you’ve just ordered.
The manager does speak a bit of English and also has supplementary pictures of the food on his iPhone; he’ll also help you balance the spicy dishes with the not too spicy.

Brisk clip

I ended up ordering what we always get in a Sichuanese place: ma po tofu (“pockmarked grandmother” tofu), stir-fried chicken with chilies, fire-exploded kidneys and french beans cooked in hot oil with minced pork.
The manager recommended a number of dishes: fat belly pork slices with preserved vegetable, fish head with pickled red peppers and eel braised with garlic.

The dishes soon began to emerge from the kitchen at a fairly brisk clip, but it seemed someone had forgotten to turn on the rice cooker. We began with the first few dishes and soon had our mouths on fire, while the waitress wrung her hands and told us that the rice had just come to a boil.
All seemed lost, until we pointed out that she could run across the street and buy rice in any of the fast-food places in the area.

She disappeared and returned with six cups of hot, steaming rice just in time for the arrival of the chicken in chilies, one of the iconic Sichuan dishes.

Theirs is one of the better interpretations of this dish, with enough meat on the bones (rather than almost all bones, as one tends to get in China), and the chicken fragrant with sesame oil and the scent of the chilies.
The fire-exploded kidneys were also excellent, as were the pork slices with preserved vegetables.

Sameness

All the individual dishes were good, but as my wife pointed out, there was a sameness about the flavor-base of all the food on the table, while a more rarified restaurant would have cleaner, more distinct flavors.
The dry-fried long beans would taste more of vegetables rather than a variant of the chicken; the eel would have a lighter flavor; the fire-exploded kidneys would have less sauce and more aromatics like leeks and ginger.

But then again, I don’t know how much of this is the fault of the restaurant and due to my ineptitude at ordering. A friend later explained that the key to ordering in a Sichuan restaurant is balance, not just of the different flavors of Sichuan cuisine, but also of cooling dishes to round out the body heat.

I heartily recommend this restaurant with the caveat that you have to be in a fairly adventurous mood, as well as possess a masochistic willingness to have the roof of your mouth blown off. This is uncomfortable food at its best, challenging everything, from your taste buds to the limits of language barrier.

Hot Space Chinais at 2/F Juno St. corner Makati Avenue. Call 8331071, 0917-5434303.