Spicy & Tasty.(Restaurant review)

For several years, spice fanatics have been making pilgrimages to Flushing in order to visit this brass-and-faux-marble shrine to the Sichuan peppercorn, and with reason. It's the sort of place where, if you turn to ask the people at the next table how they like a certain dish, they are apt to invite you to try some. If the restaurant's name lacks modesty, its renditions of the classics--mapo tofu, dry-sauteed green beans, dan dan noodles--really are spicier and tastier than those on offer elsewhere. Ma la, the trademark Sichuan flavor that combines numbing ma--Sichuan peppercorns (actually, crushed seedpods from the prickly-ash tree)--and spicy la--chile peppers or chile oil--is in abundant supply. The other night, the fish fillet in fresh pepper, a stew of flounder and greens with a scattering of crunchy red peppercorns, in a chile-oil broth, offered a transcendent, maybe mind-altering dose of ma la. It left the tongue vibrating between hot and cool, scorching and tingling.

Far more challenging, though, and not to be found on the menus of the standard-bearer Chinese restaurants in Manhattan, was the stinky tofu. It comes various ways--fried or sauteed, with peanuts or in spicy ...