Restaurants
Hunan restaurant just off the Alexandra Road strip serving genuinely spicy provincial cooking: chopped chilli fish head, smoked pork, and stir-fries heavy on fresh and pickled peppers. Also known for an oversized youtiao shared around the table.
Hunan portions assume a table that shares, so two people ordering the way four would will lose the contest before the kitchen does. Chef Tian's sits on McClelland Road, one street back from the Alexandra strip, cooking the provincial register properly rather than sanding it down for a general audience.
Hunan is not Sichuan, and the difference is most of the point. Sichuan heat arrives with numbing peppercorn behind it, in layers. Hunan heat is drier and more direct: fresh chillies, pickled chillies, smoke and salt, coming straight at you. The province is judged on dishes built around chopped chilli, cured and smoked pork, and stir-fries where peppers are the ingredient rather than the seasoning. Spice tolerance is a real conversation to have with your server instead of a bravado test, because this is not a style that treats chilli as decoration.
McClelland sitting a street back from Alexandra changes the visit in a practical way. The restaurants fronting Alexandra get the walk-by traffic and the worst of the congestion, while the units behind are quieter to reach, though on a Friday night nothing in this pocket is easy. Richmond has enough regional Chinese restaurants that you could eat a different province every week for a couple of months and still not finish the list. Hunan is one most people skip, usually assuming it is Sichuan under another name. It is not, and the gap between them is worth a trip to find out.
In the Golden Village neighbourhood of Richmond.
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