This is the Sichuan restaurant that inspired Mission Chinese in San Francisco

Spices has served the people of San Francisco since 2003. The original owner, a Taiwanese man, started the restaurant as a mix between Sichuan and Taiwanese influences. (Sister restaurant Spices 2 closed permanently in 2015, and Zhang said via text he is not affiliated with Spices 3 in Oakland.)

In 2010, when Zhang bought the business, he focused solely on Sichuan cuisine. “Sichuan food is famous for its numbing spicy. Sichuan uses those small peppercorns that make your tongue numb.” When asked what the numbing sensation feels like, he recounted with a laugh, “Some customers say, ‘How do you describe the numbing feeling?’ [I say] it’s like you stuck a battery in your mouth!”

While Sichuan food is known to be spicy and numbing, the cuisine is actually bursting with subtle flavors that get overshadowed by the conversation around the spicy peppercorns. The málà (a term describing the combination of the two Chinese characters numbing and piquant) properties of the husks that cocoon the dried, pebble-sized reddish-pink berries of the pepper plant create a flavor profile that is actually quite floral, and it’s evident in most classic Sichuan dishes.

On my visit to Spices, I was eager for the nuance of flavors and textures in each dish. The spicy cumin lamb was pungent from the get-go, perking the nostrils. Razor-thin furls of lamb meat peeked out of the forest-colored mountain of onions, cilantro and julienned green peppers. The meat was succulent, without that gamey taste that some fear from lamb. The caramelized onions soaked up the juices of the lamb, and there was only a slight tingly sensation from the Sichuan peppercorns. Each bite was a layered combination of delicate chew and “al dente” crunch.

For the mapo tofu, white, silken cubes of tofu jutted out of the chili oil and minced beef stew like crystals on an amethyst geode to make an exceptionally runny-nose experience with rose-scented undertones. The fish fillet in flaming red oil, a fan favorite according to Zhang, was a bowl of red liquid splotched with mancala beads of chili oil and floating pieces of plump fish that covered a fistful of pickled cabbage. The balance of spice, brine and creamy, weightless white fish flesh was remarkable.

There are many restaurants in San Francisco serving Sichuan cuisine, but Mission Chinese, from chef and restaurateur Danny Bowien, garnered significant media attention and praise for his Sichuan-influenced flavors. It was Spices, however, that influenced Bowien to focus on these flavors for Mission Chinese. “We started the business very specialist at Sichuan food. Over the years we [decided to] update our menu each two years,” Zhang said. For him, it’s all about improvement to keep his business running.

Every few years, Zhang and his wife visit China to research the growing culinary trends that are happening in their home country. “Even in China, those trends change year by year. We really want to catch those flavors to make sure our customers can taste the most updated flavors,” he said. That’s why, in 2016, Zhang updated the menu to include Hunan cuisine, as well.

Zhang is from the northern part of the Guangdong province in China, which sits just southeast of Hunan province. “It’s a very huge province. So, our taste is exactly the same as Hunan spicy food. It’s close to Hunan province and cuisine,” he said. Zhang inherited Sichuan cuisine, but with Hunan cuisine, he’s adding his own mark on Spices. “[Because I’m from northern Guangdong] that’s why I can provide Hunan food because I know what it tastes like.”

While Sichuan and Hunan cuisine are both known for spicy food, they offer a different type of spice. “Hunan spicy food is more famous for its fresh chili pepper. It uses a lot of fresh chili pepper instead of the small numbing spicy peppercorn. In Hunan food, we do more wok-fried style and we cut the ingredients into small pieces. It’s more easy to [eat] with rice,” Zhang described.

Some of the Hunan highlights of the menu include wok-fried pork, pickled long bean with ground pork and wok-fried duck with special red bean sauce. “All the customers really like it, so we keep selling those ones,” said Zhang. And he’s happy to be serving both Hunan and Sichuan flavors to his customer base in the Inner Richmond.

The neighborhood was hit hard during the pandemic. Zhang mentioned the lively business sector of Clement Street had many business closures and “the street was very lonely.” He also noticed that people seemed to be moving out of the neighborhood. “I could tell some people moved out of the Richmond area, too. I saw a lot of moving trucks, sadly,” he remarked. “But now it’s getting better.”

Zhang is perhaps most proud that he was able to keep his entire team intact without letting anyone go. The team of seven, four in the kitchen and three front-of-house workers, which includes himself and his wife, is a good size for his small business, Zhang said. “They are all still here. We are working really hard to provide food,” he said. “We actually sold the same [month over month] as 2019. We have a lot of loyal customers supporting our business.”

As I leave the restaurant, I turn around one more time and I see Kenny hunched over, phone to his ear, scrolling through the iPad, packaging to-go orders and doing a multitude of other restaurant operations. There’s still two more hours of service to go, and tomorrow, he’ll do it again.

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It’s Inner Richmond Month at SFGATE. We’ll be diving deep into the neighborhood for the entirety of August as part of a new series where we’ll be highlighting a different corner of San Francisco every month this year.