Opening a restaurant is tough. Even if you have the flair, you also need premises and money. This helps explain the worldwide trend for private kitchens, where talented chefs cook for you, either in their own homes or borrowing someone else's. Nowhere has the private kitchen become so popular as on Hong Kong Island where land prices mean that the property market is a closed shop. Ambitious chefs (many from mainland China) have opened about 50 private kitchens. These fall in and out of fashion, but I am given the number for Da Ping Huo with a trusting, knowing wink by a friend. It throws them when I ask for a table for one, as most private kitchens take bookings for a minimum of eight, but yes, I'll share a table, so yes, I turn up for dinner at 8.30pm to be led into a basement flat that's decorated on the cheap, but with bags of style.
Owner Wang Hai has a face that looks like a photofit picture, wears round hornrims that slope from right to left, and says "so sorry" a lot (even though he has nothing to be sorry for). Wang Hai is a fine artist who arrived from Beijing in the 1980s and whose hypnotic paintings adorn the walls. His wife Wong Siu King is from Sichuan, and cooks beautifully. Sichuan food is moist and chilli oily, so is excellent for practising your chopstick technique and ruining your shirt. Da Ping Huo has a wine list, or you can bring your own. I order Tsing Tao beer and fresh sugar cane juice, and say hello to my tablemates, Reginia and Brownie. Our meal is like this: minced pork and sweet potato batons. Comforting. Sweet and sour cucumber dipping sauce. Lip-tingly carrot and jelly fish with sesame seeds, and a bowl of toasted pine nuts with tiny cubed vegetables, full of flavour and the chopped pale green stem of some herb or another. Chilli and cold jelly noodles with a crunchy yellow dried bean. This is spicy, and is served with tissues for our runny noses, so sorry.
A mouthwatering chicken with peanuts, cold, slightly oily, slightly sweet, slightly chewy, then soothing, nourishing chicken soup like my mum would make (were she Sichuanese and not from south Manchester). It is fennel-scented and topped with scrambled egg white. Chilli beef, served with rice. The brisket tastes of star anise and is phenomenally fatty - no lean cuisine here, mate. Spicy shrimp, shell on. Pretty hard to eat with chopsticks, but pretty delicious, too. Madame Ma's spicy tofu, custard soft, hot as hell, with those Sichuan peppercorns that numb your gums, and enough spice to make me cry into a bowl of delicate vegetable soup with drowned mustard cress. Reginia, Brownie and I are on our second box of Kleenex. Next, Sichuan dumpling in garlic chilli oil. Hot enough for your head to tell you that the walls are made of rubber. Dessert is chilled jelly with tofu and something tapioca-like. It tastes of chilli.
With flushed sinuses, wet eyes and a chilli-high, we all applaud Wong Siu King. Bending slightly forward, our chef sounds a note from a tuning fork. Hands clasped to her tiny bosom, she sings a Sichuanese love song. The power of her contralto is startling, and the small space seems to shake with her vibrato. Her eyes, too, fill with tears and the room swoons.
· Lower Ground, Hilltop Plaza, 49 Hollywood Road, Central 2559 (00852 2559 1317, mobile +9051 4496). HK$250 (£18) per head plus drinks. Reservations essential. Five minutes by cab from the Grand Hyatt Hotel (hongkong.grand.hyatt.com). Cathay Pacific (020-8834 8888, cathaypacific.com) flies London-Hong Kong from £536 rtn inc tax.
