Sergeant Pepper

Han Dynasty's owner is something else — and the same goes for the food.

by Trey Popp

Neal Santos FIRE IN THE HOLE: Han Dynasty's dry pots bring the heat. The lamb rendition is seriously spicy, but the inclusion of water chestnuts and sweet red peppers tames each bite.

[ review ]

Before he disclosed his porn-star alias and started talking dirty, Han Chiang stood in a crisp button-down shirt selling a skeptical table on the merits of cold beef and tripe.

The owner of Old City's Han Dynasty was off to a rocky start. "It's my favorite thing on the menu," he told us. "The tripe is like rubber and has no flavor."

Only by comparison to his verdict on the Kung Pao chicken could this be called an endorsement. ("BOR-ing," he had groaned.) A few murmurs of acquiescence bubbled up anyway, and Chiang surveyed his order pad. "You don't have a vegetable. You have to have a vegetable. What do you want?"

"Which one's your favorite?"

"I don't like vegetables."

"Then why are you making us get one?"

"Because you have too much meat. And vegetables are good for your sex life. I'm going to take off the fish and bring you pea greens."

That being that, Chiang now paused. "Does anyone not eat an ingredient I should know about?"

Yes, someone answered: mammalian stomach lining.

Chiang wasn't having it. "Oh, those little tripes are so cute, you just want to eat them up!"

There are plenty of big personalities in the restaurant business, but few blend charisma and candor quite like the impish Han Chiang — or "Handy Nasty," if you prefer his make-believe adult-entertainment alias. That, of course, shares the same spelling, if not spacing, as Han Dynasty, which he opened on Chestnut Street at the turn of the year. (The nickname proliferated thanks in part to Chiang's all-lowercase Twitter handle, "handynastyphila.") It's the third location in Chiang's so-far-suburban empire. He's waiting for a liquor license to justify the little bar in back, but for now it's BYO.

Disdain for dumbed-down Chinese food is Chiang's shtick. Or part of it, at any rate. The Taiwan native also likes to tell you what to eat, override your order and request permission to drop the occasional F-bomb. It happens that these are exactly the qualities Center City's Chinese-food scene needs.

Han Dynasty serves Sichuan food and considers proper spicing (read: all the way up to napalm level) its raison d'être. Translation: You need a guide. Sichuan cuisine is absurdly varied. In her seminal English-language cookbook Land of Plenty, Fuschia Dunlop enumerates 23 distinct flavor categories that characterize it. Next she cites a 1998 Sichuan culinary encyclopedia listing the 56 cooking methods it employs.

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Han Dynasty's menu is organized according to about a dozen of these. There's dry-pot style and dry-fry style; long hot pepper style and pickled chili style; double-cooked style and crispy rice style; and so on. All the better that Chiang wants to work it out for you, anyway. It's tough to find somebody who can do that in Chinatown, and part of Chiang's genius is the way his irreverent chatter makes you forget he's holding your hand.

But he is. Which takes us back to the cold tripe.

I've eaten tripe in half a dozen countries and I've hated it every time. Rubbery and flavorless makes it sound better than it is. It's not so much a food of poverty as one of utter desperation. The only reason I submitted to it here was to avoid losing face. So the subsequent epiphany was all the more shocking. Sliced, like the beef it mingled with, into strips almost as thin as cellophane wrap, Han's flavorless tripe became a sounding board for a symphony of minced peanuts and sesame seeds in a slick of chili oil the color of pale rubies. The cold plate was incendiary with capsaicin, yet every single seed and nut fragment drummed open a taste bud, like rapid-fire timbale rimshots above the slow bass-drum beat of shaved beef.

For the first dish out of the kitchen, it was a scorcher — and it would get company. But Chiang orchestrated a meal that traveled from spicy to sweet to sour and back again, sometimes within a single swallow. Springy dan dan noodles — nutty with sesame paste, fragrant with beef — broke on the tongue in a quick burst of sweetness and left a slow burn in its wake. A clear soup of glass noodles, flounder and preserved mustard greens rang with a mouth-watering sourness. Dry-pot lamb prickled the lips with Sichuan peppercorns and cranked up the kiln level with scorched dried red chilies — two quite different sorts of heat — but every water chestnut and sweet red pepper stood out in soothing relief.

Not everything is an extravaganza of chilies. Surprisingly good shrimp swam in a sweet-and-sour sauce that penetrated, but didn't permeate, the blocks of deep-fried crisped rice at the bottom. Pork and bamboo strips in garlic sauce were a balm, not a fire fight. Sweet Taiwanese sausage really did need that garnish of raw garlic slices to punch down the sucrose.

That said, the kitchen goes full bore on dishes at the top end of the heat scale. Enough to make your face flush and your body quiver (though the latter was due more to the frigid air wafting up from the basement, which Chiang ought to address). Yet the more important part of Han Dynasty's formula may be that in all other respects, this is familiar food. Cold tripe is not for the timid, but that's about as weird as it gets (and it bears repeating that this was the tripe that made me see the light). You won't risk facing down shark fin or loofah sponge or bird's nest soup.

That's not a complaint. Han Chiang's take on Sichuan food is lusty and full-flavored, but easy to approach. And under his supervision, dinner can be not only a riot but a steal. For less than I usually spend on a meal for four, he brought out enough food for eight. And going with a large group is the best way to squeeze the most variety and mirth out of a meal here. So welcome to the city, Handy Nasty. We needed someone who could make us hot, but not completely bothered.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Han Dynasty | 108 Chestnut St., 215-922-1888, handynasty.net. Daily, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Appetizers, $1.50-$9.95; soups, $6.95-$10.95; noodles and fried rice, $6.95-$10.95; entrées, $12.95-$22.95. Currently BYOB. Wheelchair accessible.