There's only one way to tell a real Sichuan restaurant from a fake.

Take a fresh Sichuan pepper, inhale its woodsy, citrusy aroma. Pop it in your mouth for a minute and crush it gently with your teeth. Spit it out, and your tongue will be paralyzed. Your lips will be on fire. Now order a Sichuan dish at any Chinese restaurant in the GTA and see if you can replicate the experience.

"The ground pepper is very aromatic," says Liane Gillies, 39, a Torontonian who lived in Sichuan province for a year, speaks Mandarin, and runs a Chinese food eating group on meetup.com.

"You get used to having that tingling. It's like having pop rocks without the pop."

It's not actually a peppercorn at all, but the dried berries of a thorny shrub called Chinese prickly ash, or Zanthoxylum simulans. The pungency comes from the shell, not the seed, which contains a naturally occurring chemical compound that acts like a local anesthetic.

The other telltale sign you're eating real Sichuan is a platter full of chili peppers, usually the small, red pointed Chao than jiao ("facing heavenward") or the reddish brown ones that look like Chinese lanterns.

These, be forewarned, have already imparted their flavour to the finished dish and are considered garnish. Just pluck the fish, meat or veg from among the chilies and savour the infusion of fire.

That party in your mouth has a Mandarin equivalent, and it is called ma la (numbing and hot). If it's not ma la, you're eating an imitation. In Toronto, it's likely to be a Cantonese version of a Sichuan dish, and Gillies says in general, people from South China don't like spicy food.

Sichuan province, which stretches from the province of Hubei and Hunan in the east to the Himalayas and Tibet in the west, is home to the Yangtze and its tributaries. It is called the province of abundance, known for its pork production and crops such as rice, wheat, citrus fruits and sugar cane.

At Ben Shu Ra Jia, a Sichuan restaurant in Scarborough, Gillies tells the server she wants ma la.

"I always have to clarify it with them or else they'll make it Lai Wa Heen," she says, referring to the haute Chinese restaurant in the Metropolitan Hotel known for its Cantonese dim sum. It recently branched out and added regional Chinese fare, including a few Sichuan dishes, to its extensive menu.

Sichuan must-haves include ma po tofu and dan dan noodles, as well as gang bao chicken (kung pao chicken in Cantonese), spicy dried beef and melt-in-your mouth fish cooked in chilies and oil. Not to be missed are Sichuan pickled vegetables, hot and sour fried matchstick potatoes, tea-smoked duck and any dish with "fish flavour," which contains no fish at all, but rather is a garlic sauce associated with fish dishes.

At Sichuan Garden on Spadina Ave., John Zhang has dishedout authentic Sichuan food since 2001.

Born in the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, the former editor moved to Canada in 1993 and took over a restaurant called Fuchu on College St., named after Fujian province where seafood predominates. He couldn't help but include a few dishes from his native province.

"I found out gradually that more and more people were coming to us for gang bao chicken," he says. "My restaurant was the only one that could make it."

That's when he decided to give the diners what they wanted. Over the years Zhang has learned the techniques of Sichuan cooking, which he says has 20 to 30 distinct tastes and hundreds of dishes.

Its mounting popularity is reflected in the customers who flock to Sichuan resturants, mainly people from mainland China, as well as a growing number of Westerners who can handle the heat, and immigrants from countries where chilis are common.

"Even Cantonese young people, a lot of them start to eat this food, and once they start eating it they can't stop because it is addictive," says Zhang.

As more and more Chinese have immigrated to the GTA, they have settled in the northeastern reaches of the city, in Scarborough and Markham and Richmond Hill.

The Sichuan restaurants there are crowded on the weekends, and a 30-minute wait for a table is not unusual, says Zhang, who lives in Richmond Hill. But he won't move, content to draw on a clientele that includes a United Nations of people from the nearby University of Toronto.

Up north, restaurateur Scott Jiang is banking on the popularity of Sichuan cooking to float not one but three Sichuan eateries. The former civil engineer and his partner David Lin took over Backyard Garden on Steeles Ave. E. in Markham five years ago, while Sichuan Legend on Midland Ave. in Scarborough has been open for 2 1/2 years. They unveiled a third restaurant, Chilli Secrets on Leslie St. in Richmond Hill, two weeks ago.

"In the beginning, 80 per cent of our customers were from mainland China. Now they are from everywhere," he says.

One of his chefs recently moved down the street to Ben Shu Ra Jia, where he hired chef Jun Zhu, who went to cooking school in Sichuan and has 12 years' experience.

"Anyone will tell you this is the one to come to," says Gillies, who thought Ben Shu Ren Jia had more ma la than Backyard Garden and Chilli Secrets. "But it's a long drive to Markham."

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