Rating: 7/10

Telephone 020-7287 6688
Address 28 Frith Street, London W1
Open All week, noon-midnight
Price Around £40 a head, including drinks
Wheelchair access & WC

Never in a long career as the country's least respected writer on the subject have I been so bamboozled by a restaurant as I am by Bar Shu. Almost everything about this stylish place is great. The upstairs room is coolly done out in a neutral but far from sterile way, with slate-grey walls, Perspex panels enlivened by swirly paintings and sepia prints of Chinese rural life. There are picturesque views over posturing, ponytailed ponces pretending to be producers on the Soho street below. The service is delightful. As for the menu, this somehow makes garish photographs of dishes - a practice seldom seen outside tourist traps and burger bars - almost voguish. "Please note that dishes may not appear exactly as shown," reads a disclaimer, but if that suggests one of those estate agent snaps that transforms a dank broom cupboard into an airy drawing room twice the size of the state ballroom at Buckingham Palace, the truth is otherwise. The food is far more of itself than the most lurid photo suggests.

The cuisine comes from the streets of Sichuan, and whether the province is spelled that way or Szechuan, the word is a rare instance of culinary onomatopoeia, sounding like something dangerous sizzling away in a wok. This is not for the squeamish. Chinatown's old "not for whitey" principle that puts ass's gonad stir-fried with bamboo shoots untranslated at the back of the menu is here turned on its head - stir-fried pig's stomach and preserved duck eggs are at the front in glorious technicolour.

The cooking, meanwhile, strives for, and sometimes achieves, novel and intriguing balances between texture and flavour. The one thing that threatens this otherwise rather brilliant equation - and forgive the lurch into hyper-technical restaurant critic lingo - is that some of it doesn't taste very nice. Those duck eggs, for example, which our giggly waitress described as the Chinese equivalent of blue cheese (nothing like it, in fact), were fascinating for their weird translucency, and I'm pleased to have sampled one (although, other than to win a large bet, one must suffice).

However, two soups, one hot and sour, the other of chicken with silver ear fungus and "medicinal milk retch root" (go on then, sugar that pill), shared the same delicate, aromatic chicken stock: buckwheat noodles with the chicken were beautifully made, while beef slices in a gloriously eye-watering, chilli-infested broth were succulent and magnificent.

At this stage, we were raving about the food. "I'm using taste buds I didn't know I had," said my friend, wiping a chilli-induced teardrop from the corner of an eye. "This is like no food I've eaten before." But then things took a turn, when the Sichuan peppercorn, one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of oriental cookery, seized control.

This is a spice that brooks no argument. The faintest brush leaves a human tongue numbed for 15 minutes and, as I learned once during a short losing battle with a Ken Hom cookbook, a peppercorn too many will obliterate every other flavour. Here, the chefs literally pepper their sauces with the little bleeders, until one's speech suggests a cleft palate in urgent need of surgery. Perhaps it's an acquired taste. Maybe after 20 years, you'd learn to love this peppercorn and revere its might. After 20 minutes, however, we were desperate for relief, and the hotpot that forms the highlight of a Sichuan meal provided no such thing.

This is quite a performance. A gas burner is brought to the table, and on top is placed a metal container split in two, one half containing that aromatic stock we first encountered with the soup, the other filled with another bubbling, chillified liquid that you are warned on no account to drink. Instead, you dip various things ordered separately - asparagus, prawns, deep-fried pork, tofu (even, bizarrely, luncheon meat) - into one of the soups and wait for it to cook. It's a long wait that reminds you why one of the joys of eating out is that other people do the cooking for you. After all that, everything had the vinegary, slightly rancid flavour of the Sichuan peppercorn anyway.

So time-consuming was the hotpot that it was 4pm when we left Bar Shu, agreeing that this was the most original eating experience we'd had in years, and that anyone with an interest in food should try it, but it's odds against they'd ever go back.