Spice Girls

Chengdu is the first place I decided to visit due solely to being intrigued by its food. I love spicy food and Sichuan really is spicy food headquarters. The food even goes to their heads, with local women nicknamed ‘spice girls’ due to their fiery tempers. On top of my culinary agenda was the daddy of all things spice; Sichuan hotpot.

Chinese food is designed to be shared, and hotpot is no different. I needed to coerce some willing, or perhaps naïve, hungry tummies to join my foodie endeavors. “You can’t come to Sichuan without trying Sichuan hotpot,” was the catchphrase of my hostel-wide campaign.

Guilted into participating, a group toddled down to the hostel’s local. Inside, Chengdu’s minus ten January temperatures were replaced by their summer equivalents in an instant. With my eyes watering, I could just make out the waiters running around in sweat-drenched t-shirts. A dreadlocked German made for the door; I willed him back through my narrowed eyes.

With our hotpot bubbling away, in went beef, pork, mushrooms, lotus roots, potato and cabbage, always from a safe distance as hovering over the concoction would reduce us to coughing fits. The Sichuan peppers, seemingly innocuous, seemed to multiply before my eyes. Nevertheless, I dived in. Alternating between hotpot and peanut milk, we got through it. With our noses running down past our chins, we even earned some thumbs up from red-faced regulars when leaving.

The next day I felt fine, laughing at the graffiti on the hostel’s toilet doors; “hotpot ruined my life”. So when I was asked by a different group to join them in hotpot fun the following night, I flexed my muscles and agreed, swaggering in and exchanging knowing grins with the waiters from the night before.

There’s a Japanese saying which goes along the lines of “climb Mt Fuji once and you’re a man, climb Mt Fuji twice and you’re a fool”.

After the hell I went through in the days to follow, I think that may also be the case for Sichuan hotpot.