Move Over Hot Chicken, There’s a Hotter Chicken in Town

In the summer of 2019, the American fast-food chain Panda Express introduced a limited-time-only special it called Sichuan hot chicken. Never mind that the dish would have been unrecognizable to anyone in Sichuan, a province in southwestern China. The chicken came in a favored American form — white-meat strips, carefully shorn of any reminders that an animal once clucked and tottered across this earth, and pulled nubbly and bronzed from the deep fryer. The menu promised numbing Sichuan pepper in the sauce. Chiles could be detected in a shake of carmine dust. (You got another shake if you ordered “extra spicy.”)

Reviewers had words of praise: tender, crisp. But all seemed to agree that the hot chicken was not, in fact, hot. It was meek. Nor did it offer much of the heady tingle of Sichuan pepper (not a chile, despite its name), which at its most potent can make your entire mouth buzz like a hive. Instead there was the merest, gentlest ruffling of the tongue.

Recipe: Lazi Ji (Chongqing Chicken With Chiles)

To be fair, Panda Express never pretended that Sichuan hot chicken was a Sichuan dish. In posts online, the company described it as “an authentic Chinese twist on an American comfort classic” — a homage to Nashville hot chicken, whose origins go back to the city’s segregated Black neighborhoods of the 1930s. (It was purportedly first concocted as a blistering punishment for a philandering lover, as the historian Rachel Louise Martin recounts in “Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story.”) This combination proved so popular that other food outlets soon took up the idea, with Sichuan hot chicken popping up from Columbia, S.C., to Wenatchee, Wash. “Sichuan” became a shorthand for a vaguely Asian spiciness, achieved via a quick slug of chile oil or sriracha (named after the coastal town in Thailand where it was created). Even McCormick, the global spice company, has a recipe on its website, pairing Sichuan pepper with Frank’s RedHot cayenne sauce.

Food may be hot in Sichuan, but in Chongqing it’s hotter.