Got to welcome a couple of new folks (ruthw and FarmerMorgan), and managed to confirm that yes, indeed, Spice Spirit is a substantially better restaurant than it was when it opened.
There's a lot of promise here, and we barely scratched the surface. There is a HUGE, picture-laden menu for anybody who's a little nervous about jumping in, and though we certainly enjoyed some dishes more than others, I wouldn't say there was a dud on the table.
Quick bit of history on this place, which is a little entertaining. If it seems atypically posh, that's because Spice Spirit was originally going to be the very first franchised location of Lao Sze Chuan, a tremendously popular (and tremendously delicious, I can attest) Sichuan restaurant in Chicago. Lao Sze Chuan was run by Tony Hu, a natural-born restaurateur who went from running one Sichuan restaurant to running a dozen excellent Chinese restaurants all over Chicago, seemingly overnight. The dude was just amazing. Unfortunately, it turns out he was also a crook. Tony got busted for some pretty heavy duty tax evasion (under-reporting cash receipts, natch), he went to jail, and the franchise deal fell apart. At this point, the original (still?) owner of Spice Spirit had built out the space and paid to send his staff to train in Chicago for months, so he figured he'd better just open up a restaurant anyway.
Point being, it's kind of understandable that it was maybe a little discombobulated when we first went years ago.
Anyway, it's a very different place now, and here are some of our highlights:
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This was a solid fuqi feipian, listed on the menu as "Sliced Beef and Ox Tongue in Chili Sauce." Or perhaps the menu title is a little more apt, since there was no tendon involved. Bummer. Still, a good dish. Very thick-cut tongue and shank (I think), with some fairly thick batons of tripe beneath, sporting just a bit of funk. Less oily, more saucy then most, almost a little mellow by fuqi feipian standards, but a nice, balanced depth.
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I think everybody loved this one. There's a little showmanship involved in the "Green Pepper and Eggplants with Century Egg." They bring the dish out in a giant mortar and beat the snot out of it with a big wooden pestle tableside before serving. So you end up with this silky roasted eggplant mash, punctuated by bright bits of green bell pepper and mouthfuls of quartered preserved egg. I want to get a little deeper into the vegetables, but this will be hard not to order.
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I may have been the only one who was into the frog. It's so prevalent in China and such a mild-flavored meat that I'm always disappointed we don't see more of it here, particularly since Texas raises the most prized eatin' frogs in the world. (The United States is a frog exporter. Go figure.) There are an awful lot of bones involved, so I suspect this "griddle" version might not have been the best choice. There are a few frog dishes on the menu, and perhaps one that's stewed softer and more slurpable might go over a little better. But I thought this was awfully nice, buried in sweet, spicy onions.
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No controversy with the Hunan Style Sauteed Beef with Wild Pepper. Everybody dug this one. There's a Hunan section on the menu, and It is SO HARD to find any Hunan cuisine at all that I'm tempted to come back here just to do a Hunan lunch at some point. The punch here comes from the herb that we presume is the "wild pepper," which exit2lef described as a kind of turbocharged arugula. And there are also little bits of pickled chiles (Hunanese employs a lot of pickled chiles) that Nightbloom felt bore an apt resemblance to peperoncini. In any case, everybody enjoyed this one quite a bit.
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We did some benchmarking with the Chongqing chicken (listed on the menu as "Hot & Crispy Chicken Bite"), and I think the consensus was that this was a near miss. The texture on the fry was GORGEOUS, and while many of us are decidedly pro-bone, the ratio here was a little tough to work with. You had to nibble so much that you didn't get enough of the coating, which meant you also didn't get much of the flavor. They did offer a boneless version, and I'd do that next time. For today's assembled, I had a bit of the leftovers cold this evening, and the flavor POPPED when I could take my time and kind of gnaw on it for a while. I think boneless is the answer here.
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Maneuvering the Bo Bo Chicken around the table is a bit of a challenge, but this is fun and delicious. Classic Sichuan dish, all kinds of little goodies skewered and stuck in an oily broth heavy with Sichuan pepper. (They do a spicy version with more chile as well.) Bits of chicken thigh, ham, tofu noodles, black fungus, garlic cloves... pick a stick and see what you get. The only thing I always hate about this dish is that there's so much broth leftover and it seems such a shame to let it go to waste. I packed up a big container and I'm thinking that warming it up and taking a some shaved hotpot-thin pork and greens for a swim should yield some nice results.
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And the big signature dish, their Wushan Grilled Fish. I call it their signature dish since it takes up an entire page right at the front of the menu. And this was *excellent*. I might ask about a bigger fish next time. There just wasn't a lot of flesh on this fellow. But what we got was dynamite. This broth had plenty of mala going on (though not abusive), but it also had a really deep, full flavor that's a lot less common. I'm thinking it was probably built on a really nice stock rather than some underpowered, thin broth. You can add your choice of vegetables and extra meats, so it's almost fish + hotpot, and you'd do well to be a little more selective than we were. Anything that is going to soak up that broth (potatoes, for example) should probably take priority.
We had a few other dishes, but nothing particularly of note. Some boilerplate garlicky smashed cucumbers, tasty as always, plus some steamed garlic ong choy for the sake of adding a little greenery.
But the buzz is on point. There are some good things happening here. I'm looking forward to hearing about what others try as they check it out.
Spice Spirit
azspicespirit.com
480-809-6030
1955 W Main Street
Mesa, AZ, 85201
