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and the inexpensive lunch special combinations on Brandy Ho’s lunch menu, it was easy. The harvest pork, which would become my go-to dish, consists of tender slices of pork with diced onion and Chinese cabbage, hot-wokked in a wine and “hot bean sauce.” The only critical question from the server is “How hot? Mild, medium or hot?” — with a cautionary declaration that hot here means what it implies. I recall looking around the table at my more experienced colleagues for guidance but they just laughed. “C’mon, Tabasco Man. You gotta go for the hot!” I took this as a dare, which it was — and the server wasn’t lying. You have to pick through the mounds of red chili peppers to get to the food. As a person who used to drink Tabasco sauce from the bottle, I didn’t suffer third-degree tongue burn but, boy, those two (or was it three?) cold Tsingtaos really helped. From that point to this day, I’ve almost always stuck to medium, because the succulent pork melded with the savory vegetables is just too delicious to let the peppers overwhelm the flavors. Anyway, I was hooked. As a showcase of the range of Hunan dishes, the harvest pork comes with two starters — an extremely tangy hot-and-sour soup and a cold noodle salad with sliced cucumbers in a divine peanut sauce that is the perfect counterpoint to the spicy main course. If I didn’t order the harvest pork, I ordered the house smoked ham with fresh cloves of garlic, green onions and bamboo shoots. When the dish arrives, it’s reminiscent of home; think the wafting aromas of a South Louisiana smokehouse suffused with the Asian aromatics of a great stir-fry. The starters for that dish include a triangular, deep-fried, melt-in-your-mouth green onion cake and spicy pickled veggies, typically cucumber, bell pepper and cabbage marinated in a hot-chili vinegar. Brandy Ho’s had two or three Hunan rivals and we tried them all, occasionally veering off for Vietnamese, Thai and sushi. But it became the regular go-to lunch place on Fridays for at least half of the news staff during the entire nine years I served in the San Francisco bureau. I would eventually learn that the restaurant had been opened by first-generation Chinese immigrants only two years before I arrived. Flash forward: I visited San Francisco this past April, and Brandy Ho’s is not simply still going strong. I went to lunch there with several former Journal colleagues and ordered — what else — the harvest pork. I can declare that it tasted exactly the same as the dish I first fell in love with in 1982. That kind of consistency explains why Brandy Ho is still cooking 37 years after it opened. There’s a delicious rival to spicy Hunan — the cuisine of the northern Chinese province of Sichuan (formerly spelled Szechuan.) But San Francisco, for all the variety of its Chinese food, isn’t the capital of American Sichuan cooking. New York is. I learned that from a great mentor, a New Yorker by the name of Glynn Mapes who was the Page One editor of the Journal when I joined the paper in San Francisco. Glynn later became the London bureau chief and was my direct boss when I served in that bureau from 1990 to 1993. We more or less transferred to positions in the New York office, which was downtown, around the same time. If I’ve become an Asian food hound, Glynn has long been the Big Dog of Asian food. Pretty much every workday at lunch time, he would leave the office and walk to Chinatown, where I think it’s possible that over the course of many years he ate in every single New York Chinatown restaurant. (His list of Chinatown restaurant recommendations still circulates in the Journal ’s New York office to this very day, despite the fact that he left the paper about two decades ago.)

San Francisco’s historic Chinatown

15-minute stroll to Chinatown’s heart. One colleague who had been there for years and learned of my spicy food cravings said, “We’re eating Hunan for lunch.” “Hu-what?” Off we went to Brandy Ho’s Hunan Food on Columbus Avenue, strolling by the iconic Transamerica Pyramid building, which is a mere three blocks from the restaurant’s front door. It was and is an unassuming place with a red, white and blue awning emblazoned with its name on its storefront. But I immediately knew I was in the right place when I saw that a long, fanciful red chili pepper replaced the apostrophe in Ho’s. Inside, the restaurant was and is as unpretentious as on the outside. A giant “NO MSG” sign dominates one wall. A bar fronts an elongated cooking station where you can sit and watch your food being prepared in giant sizzling woks over superhot fires. The main dining area is on two levels, and the tables range from two tops to some that can accommodate a dozen people. Big glass- door coolers hold the perfect pairings for the spicy food offerings: frosty cold Tsingtao beer, a perfectly fine Chinese lager, and — it being San Francisco — a good selection of craft beer, including local favorite, Anchor Steam. When you walk in you will be tempted to say what South Louisiana people say when they walk into Maw-Maw’s kitchen on red beans and rice day: “It sure smells good in here.” As a novice, I had no idea what to order other than the leanings of my palate toward pork, chicken and beef, in that order, particularly combined with chilis, chili oil and garlic. And I love my noodles. But with a little help from my colleagues who were pretty much regulars

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