At Lunch, Z&Y Produces Good Burn for the Buck

The tourists seated next to me, all of us at the communal tables in the back of Z&Y, are finishing up their orders of sweet-and-sour pork and curry beef when my fish arrives. A tuft of cilantro is placed, like an apology, on top of a bowl of broth. On the surface, a logjam of fried chiles bob up and down on a pond of oil, red on red. Their eyes grow wide. "That looks...spicy," one hazards. I tell them I'll probably be sobbing in another minute or two.

Z&Y is the kind of place I normally send people to for dinner, an island of Sichuan food in a sea of Cantonese restaurants. Even at lunch, it's not the same crowd as New Lun Ting across the street: dressed for office work, more ethnically mixed, more likely to be sharing platters of food than hunching over a rice plate or bowl of noodles. Around me, I hear more Mandarin than Cantonese. 

And although Rice Plate Journal's $10 limit prohibits me from ordering the Chongqing chicken buried in a heap of fried peppers, a dish on a third of the tables, it's easy enough to obey my own self-imposed rules. When I meet up with another writer friend for lunch, it takes 10 minutes to pick entrees off the main menu: Pork wontons floating on a crimson pool of oil, the floral citrus scent of Sichuan peppercorns it emanates almost as vivid as the fruity heat of chiles that have tinted it. Twice-cooked pork, translucent curls of steamed pork belly (a little tough, frankly) sautéed with leeks and cabbage, coated in a mix of chile oil and toasted pork fat. Oil-shriveled green beans stir-fried with salty flecks of pork and dried turnip. A decent lunch, certainly better than many of the meals I've eaten in Chinatown over the past few months.

Most of the rice plates are simple stir-fries like the curry beef, more Canto-American than Sichuan, interspersed with Sichuan standards like mapo tofu. But the dishes I've zeroed in on are the single-serving portions of its beef, pork, and fish "with flaming oil," a more straightforward description than the Chinese name for the dish: "water-boiled."  

One serving of the fish with flaming oiil is really enough for a couple of people: Under the chile-clotted surface lurk five or six palm-sized fillets, along with a few pale strips of napa cabbage, tossed in at the last minute so they don't lose their crunch. The fish has been poached just by pouring the oil and broth over it into the bowl, so the meat seems to melt the moment I put it in my mouth. I gingerly lift each piece out off, holding it over the bowl so the orange oil and Sichuan peppercorns slough off, then dab it onto my rice. The perfume of the dish is as vivid as its color, a swirl of toasted chiles, nutty sesame seeds, ginger, and that electrified-orange-zest scent of the peppercorns. Truth be told, it's not as ferocious as it appears, and my lips buzz more than they burn. 

But I do wait until my tablemates leave to grab my napkin off my lap, dabbing the sweat off my eyebrows and cheeks. 

Z&Y Restaurant, 655 Jackson (at Grant), 981-8988.

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