Golden Day, 118-120 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (020 7494 2381). Meal for two, including service, £80
Just one look at the menu and I knew this would be a 10-glass lunch. No, don't be silly. Not those sorts of glasses. I'm a lightweight me, one who long ago realised he hated hangovers much more than he liked being drunk; it is one of adulthood's Rubicons that some of us must cross with a heavy heart. These glasses would be full of water and would be the ones slugged back in the hours following my meal at Golden Day, an attempt to deal with the after-effects of dishes laden with chillies and garlic and salt and garlic and chillies and a few more chillies. And a bit more salt. None of that put me off.
The site on London's Shaftesbury Avenue was, until recently, a standard Cantonese Chinese restaurant, a little glossier than those at its back on Gerrard Street, the space filled with shiny tables and clean lines, but not fundamentally different. I used to pop in for good dim sum. The name has changed and, while there is a laminated list full of dull Cantonese staples – the sweet and sour pork and prawns with ginger and spring onion we've come to know, love and tire of – the real menu is a glorious hardback book illustrated with photographs in saturated colours of food from Hunan. Ooh, just look at the chillies on that!
The regionalisation of Chinese food is one of the more thrilling developments in Britain's restaurant scene in recent years. Szechuan places are springing up all over, dragging in a wild-eyed audience that likes to sweat over its food; I often eat at one on the Charing Cross Road called Hot Stuff, part of a small national chain, where the air carries the slight tang of urea on account of all the lip-numbing Szechuan peppercorns. After eating there my hair lies slicked back against my head and my shirt clings to me. It's not a pretty sight. Then again, I rarely am.
Hunanese food is cut from the same cloth – it majors in fire – but there are fewer of the peppercorns and an interesting preponderance of pickling and smoking. That menu is a fabulous read in itself, a kind of found poetry of things "pleasantly" spiced, of dishes that are "fragrant" and "aromatic" and clearly dying to meet you. We began with a salad of finely sliced crunchy kelp, the colour of a winter sea, dressed with garlic and chilli, plus a bowl of softened peanuts with celery and carrot, both of which would serve to cool our mouths as the meal progressed.
First up, on its own dainty burner, a small wok-style bowl of "dry pot" chicken, the on-bone pieces pressed in against whole garlic cloves and hunks of fresh ginger. It turned out not to be particularly dry at all, on account of the savoury broth at the bottom, with a depth of flavour you could swim in. Soon, though, as the flame went to work, the sauce was reducing, only increasing the intensity as we ate, until at last all the liquor had gone and the ingredients were crusting beautifully to the metalwork. Slices of smoked belly pork, the translucent fat melting on the tongue, came with heaps of pickled soya beans and looked curiously like a Chinese cassoulet. It tasted absolutely nothing like one.
Aromatic fragrant fish – I have no idea what kind of fish – was one of those dishes which rewarded hard work. It arrived, bones and all, so that you had to trim away to get at the lovely, batter-crusted white flesh, dressed with black beans, chillies and garlic. Dry-fried green beans with minced pork is one of those dishes from the Szechuan repertoire that has entered the mainstream. Here, though the beans came micro-chopped, into tiny pieces, that were still full of crunch and bright vitality.
Prices, at around £10-14 a main, are generally on a par with the classier Chinese places in this corner of town. It was a big lunch for two people, but the flavours were so utterly compelling, the hit so addictive that we kept going back, both knowing that there would be a price to pay. But this sort of food is eaten entirely in the present tense, with no thought for the future. We knew we would suffer. We knew we would be left attempting to quench an all but unquenchable thirst. We didn't care.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profiler for all his reviews in one place
