A new team of Sichuan chefs took over the kitchen at Tasty China restaurant in Marietta this past summer, and word quickly spread: Here was food hot enough to burn Atlanta anew.

Oh, there was more to it. The menu lists more than 100 exciting and unusual dishes you won't find elsewhere in the city. Fried fish sings with the musky flavor of cumin, steaming "bubble bread" puffs like a balloon, and curiosities such as "husband and wife lung slice" prove catnip for the adventurous.

BRANT SANDERLIN/Staff (ENLARGE)
Sichuan peppercorns were banned until recently in the United States because of a risk of citrus canker.
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But the salient feature of many dishes at Tasty China is their stunning, chile-stoked intensity. The food doesn't merely burn your palate; it also leaves it feeling strangely anesthetized — like a shot of novocaine or even a defibrillator applied directly to your oral cavity.

What's going on?

"The key features of Sichuan food are ma and la — numb and hot," explains owner Dahe Yang as he walks into the noisy kitchen where his team of crackerjack Sichuan chefs, Peter Zhang and Yujie Huang, man the woks.

The heat comes from red chile and the numbness from Sichuan peppercorns — which aren't peppercorns at all but rather the dried berries of the prickly ash shrub. (Its close relative is sansho, the mildly astringent spice Japanese chefs serve with eel.) Together, these two ingredients create a captivating push and pull sensation on your tongue. Zhang and Huang use both with easy abandon.

The reddish Sichuan peppercorns in Tasty China's kitchen are clearly of better quality than the brown peppercorns sold at many Asian markets. They have a pleasant floral spice, like coriander seeds, in addition to their heightened numbing sensation. They also have the strange effects of covering the tongue with pinpoint prickles and making liquids seem acidic. Follow a full-tilt-boogie dish from this kitchen with a sip of water, and you'll swear the latter tastes like Diet Sprite.

If this all sounds like unfamiliar taste bud terrain, there's a reason. For more than three decades the Sichuan peppercorn was banned by the federal Department of Agriculture. A member of the citrus family, it could potentially carry a canker that is harmless to humans but potentially devastating to crops. The ban was strictly enforced in the early years of this decade, and supplies dried up. Some peppercorns got confiscated, others migrated from store shelves to an underground black market. Yang claims enterprising chefs could always find peppercorns during these years, though quality was a problem.

In 2004, the Department of Agriculture amended the ban to approve a method for heat treating the peppercorns; since that time both legal peppercorns and the better contraband peppercorns have become more prevalent.

Restaurants have been catching up ever since — restoring the long-degraded impact of ma la cooking.

Among Tasty China's ma la preparations, the one that's proven most popular with Westerners is the "hot and numbing beef roll" — a tortilla-like flatbread holding a filling of highly seasoned cold beef, cilantro and lettuce.

Yet as regular customer Sharon Li says, "Even if the dish isn't labeled ma la, there's a lot of ma and a lot of la in many of the dishes."

Other local purveyors of Sichuan food seem to be behind the curve. The area's best known such restaurant, Little Szechaun, offers only one ma la dish, ma la tofu, which is about as numbing as nonalcoholic beer. Golden Buddha in Decatur advertises Sichuan cooking, but lists no ma la dishes on its menu. An order of "Sichuan chicken" is spicy and sweet, like candy in the mouth instead of Orajel.

For now, the only place to experience this strange and exciting Chinese cooking style is at the equally strange and exciting Tasty China. Consider yourself warned.

Tasty China, 585 Franklin Road, Marietta, 770-419-9849.

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FOODS PROHIBITED BY FDA

1960: The Food and Drug Administration banned the food use of safrole — the main component in sassafras root bark — when the volatile compound was found to cause cancer in animals.

1969: FDA banned cyclamate — a sugar substitute — based on a study that showed it may be related to bladder tumors in rats.

1976: FDA banned FD&C Red No. 2 after evaluating biological data and concluding that "it appears that feeding FD&C Red No. 2 at a high dosage results in a statistically significant increase" in malignant tumors in female rats.

2004: FDA banned the sale of dietary supplements containing ephedra (ephedrine alkaloids) due to concerns over their cardiovascular effects, including elevated blood pressure and irregular heart rhythm. (On appeal)

Compiled by news researcher Joni Zeccola

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