Fiery Flavors, a restaurant serving the food of Hunan, could easily show you a familiar time. You could order crispy duck and sweet and sour pork, and leave this mildly scuffed corner of Southwark in the shadow of Canary Wharf well fed. They are all on the glossy picture-led menu. That, however, would be like going to an orgy hoping for a nice chat. Go instead intending to widen your horizons and dampen your brow. The brazen chilli heat and peppercorn buzz of Sichuan food is now widely available across the UK; the food of Hunan, with its added interest in pickling, curing and smoking, far less so. Embrace the opportunity.

If you order the fish head with pickled chillies, certainly don’t be surprised by what arrives. Its snout points towards the platter’s rim, and what remains of its silvery body is under a breaking scarlet surf of vinegary chopped chillies as if it is breaching the waters, in this case a mouth-coating, oil-rich, rust-coloured broth. Our waiter, who is enjoying our enthusiasm, has advised us to get it with noodles (“as people from Hunan do”), and they sit below its gullet, thick and white, like a child’s illustration of a ball of wool. We get to work on the meaty flakes of pale flesh behind the gills, scooping them up with the chillies and broth, and the cooling slurp of the noodles. We did not order this out of annoying culinary adventurism. We are simply eating in a vivid Technicolor to match the pictures on the menu.

Fiery Flavors — American spelling, restaurant’s own — is overseen by Tao Xu who, like many of the staff, used to be at Barshu, the groundbreaking Chinese restaurant in London’s Soho that introduced many to Sichuan food when it opened in 2006. The menu here, served in a clean-lined space of red walls and oxblood banquettes, does purposely mix the familiar with the less so, he says. Canary Wharf may be just two train stops away, but this is inner south London. They only opened in January, and they don’t want to scare the locals. Because it’s 2025 there’s a section of ribbon noodles with braised beef. There is a familiar hot and sour seafood soup, with that viscosity which soothes any cold. But there’s also a rich chilli-spiked chicken broth bobbing with knots of “peppery pork stomach” that bounce pleasingly beneath the teeth.