Mala Youhuo

Beijing's obsession with Sichuan cuisine seems to have no end, and this restaurant, where locals queue down the street on a Monday night, currently enjoys the most fanatical following. Service is surprisingly friendly for such a busy restaurant, and the mock-village decor is cheesy but fun. The signature dish, shui zhu yu (boiled fish with chili and numbing hot peppers) comes in three different varieties, grass carp (caoyu), catfish (nianyu), and blackfish (heiyu). We still prefer the traditional grass carp, but the slightly firmer and less slippery blackfish makes a nice change. For a walk on the culinary wild side, try mala tianluo, field snails stewed in chili and numbing hot pepper. Skewers are provided to extract the flesh from the sizable mollusks. Leave the innermost black part to the side, unless you want a serious tummy ache. A nice antidote to all the spice is a clear soup with seasonal leafy greens, tutang shicai. A second branch recently opened northeast of Da Zhong Si.

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