SmartShanghai | [Eat It]: Double Pepper Frog

[Eat It]: Double Pepper Frog

By Christopher St Cavish, May 28th, 2009 | In Dining

Eat It is a regular feature that cuts to the core of a given restaurant's menu, highlighting a specialty, favorite, or otherwise good thing to eat.

Rolls Royce has the Bespoke Collection. Madonna has The Immaculate Collection. The massive Sichuan restaurant Yuxin, with a massive menu to match, has the Double Pepper Collection. It's about 8 minutes flipping-time deep into the illustrated novel they present as a menu and it's worth stopping on. That's where the Fried Bullfrog with Hot Pepper and Pepper is, among ten or twelve other options of Things Covered In Alot of Green Chilies. The Sichuanese waitress will sneer a bit when you ask, deriding it mildly as a Chongqing thing -- meaning too hot. Really, sharply hot. It's not about that, though.

There are a lot of spicier things to eat in Shanghai. Xidan Chiku's "Pervert Wings", for example. Those are really, sharply hot. And completely flat. They taste what they look like -- pale grilled chicken wings covered in crimson chili flakes -- and nothing more. There's a lot more going on in Yuxin's Double Pepper frog. It's a 68rmb jumble of bright green chilies, dried Sichuan peppercorn, fresh Sichuan peppercorn still on the branch, Chinese celery, spring onion, and frog. Two things make it: the fresh Sichuan peppercorns and the frog. The fresh peppercorns have flavor. Bite down on one and just before your taste buds start hallucinating, tasting salt in your water and bitterness that's not there, you get a burst of citrus -- an almost artificial one, like what they put in floor cleaners. It's better than I just made it sound. And not something you get as much with dried Sichuan peppercorns. There's also the numbing index. The fresh peppercorns make your lips tingle like cocaine pop rocks. The standard dried ones? Can't really do that.

Nestled among the peppercorns, peppers, and Chinese celery are the bits of frog. To me, frog doesn't taste like chicken. It tastes like clean freshwater fish. That's real nice, because the freshwater fish in Shanghai tastes like mud. (Thanks, overcrowded fish farms.) The mild, firm meat makes a great platform for strong flavors and high spice and double doses of peppers. It's a splendid dish. Order yourself one.

While you're at it, order the chuanbei liangfen too. It's called something like rice "jelly" on the menu. In reality, it's more like a 2-by-4 of a noodle. It's there in the picture, those transparent planks covered in a dressing of sesame, garlic, ground Sichuan peppercorn, and chili oil. Every Sichuan restaurant does it. Yuxin's is the best.

Yuxin is huge. It takes up the third floor of a large office building. There are 26 private rooms, and that's in addition to the twelve million people that the partitioned dining room accomodates. And you'll probably still have to wait. The queues start around 6pm and die down by 8 or so. It's the best Sichuan restaurant in Shanghai, hands down, and even with a parade of large Heinekens, it's tough to spend more than 150rmb per person. Third floor of the building on the northwest corner of Chengdu Bei Lu and Weihai Lu. It's number 333 Weihai Lu. And they don't do reservations.