Then Tony Hu, a Sichuan native who had graduated from the Culinary Institute of Sichuan in 1989 and moved to the U.S. in 1993, opened Lao Sze Chuan on Archer Avenue at the edge of Chinatown and introduced a lot of this city to the numbing tingle of real Sichuan peppercorns. The Chicago Tribune gave it a rare three forks in 1999, Hu picked up the nickname 'Mayor of Chinatown,' and the original became the root of a whole family of Lao Sze Chuans. You get in through a side gate off Archer, and the room is casual to the point of being a blank slate: some nights it's a packed, loud group dinner and some nights it's quiet. The menu is enormous, so here's the shortcut. Order Tony's Chicken with Three Chili, lightly fried chicken in a sweet-hot sauce with peppercorns and dried chiles, and the Chef's Special Dry Chili Chicken, which is mostly peppers with chicken hiding inside.
Add spicy cabbage to snack on and Szechuan string beans for something green. Shrimp in lobster sauce is the mild-mannered option for the table. At lunch, build your own hot pot from meats, seafood, vegetables and noodles in a spicy or mild broth. It opens at 10:45am daily and runs late, which makes it one of the dependable late-night calls in Chinatown.
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