The jianghu dishes to order
Ranked by their place in the jianghu canon — the dishes you cannot skip if you want to know the raw, real side of the Chongqing kitchen.
1
Picture a plate that arrives as a tall heap of dried red chillies, and you have to dig out the chicken one piece at a time with your chopsticks — that is laziji, Chongqing style. Bite-sized chicken is marinated and fried crisp on the outside, tender within, then tossed with garlic, ginger, Sichuan peppercorn and several times its own volume in dried chillies. The whole chillies are not for eating; they are fried to perfume the oil and push heat into every piece of chicken. The dish was born near Geleshan Hill around 1986, using free-range farm chickens, and has anchored the jianghu canon ever since.
2
A big pot of deep-red chilli broth, bubbling away, packed with silky duck blood (the star), tripe, pork intestine, luncheon meat, bean sprouts and tofu skin, all sitting under a slick of chilli oil and Sichuan peppercorn. The dish was born at the Ciqikou wharf in the 1940s — a butcher's wife began boiling the leftover offal nobody wanted and selling it cheap, then one day dropped in fresh blood curd and found it grew more tender the longer it simmered. "Mao" (毛) means rough or slapdash in the Chongqing dialect, which fits the jianghu spirit perfectly: nobody is trying to be neat here.
The name means "water-boiled fish", but don't be fooled — what the fish is swimming in is not water but a bowl of fiery red chilli oil. Thinly sliced fish is marinated and poached briefly in a boiling broth until the flesh turns silky and tender, then topped with dried chillies and green Sichuan peppercorns and finished with a ladle of smoking-hot oil poured over the top so the spices sizzle and bloom across the whole bowl. It is searingly hot and mouth-numbing, yet the fish stays sweet and soft. The dish grew out of Chongqing hotpot fish, then went nationwide as a single dish — one of the few jianghu plates people far beyond Chongqing know well.
Shaojigong is a rooster chopped into big chunks and stewed in a pot with dried chillies, Sichuan peppercorn, ginger, garlic and spices until the meat turns tender and deeply seasoned, served in a pot kept warm over a tabletop burner. The fun of this dish is that you eat it in two acts: first the chicken in its thick, rich sauce, then once the meat is nearly gone you add stock and start dropping in vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, potato and glass noodles, turning it into a chicken hotpot. It is jianghu for a crowd — long, loud and convivial, the kind of meal that fills a noisy table for hours.
Quanshuiji means "spring-water chicken", a jianghu dish that rose to fame on Nanshan (南山), the southern hill that looks out over the city and the river. The original recipe is said to have used mountain spring water in the cooking. Free-range chicken is chopped and stir-fried with dried chillies, Sichuan peppercorn and seasonings until fragrant and hot, and is often served "one chicken, three ways" — dry stir-fried chicken, a chicken soup, and poached chicken blood. At its peak there was a whole street on Nanshan lined with quanshuiji restaurants, and Chongqing locals would drive up the hill to eat it with the city lights spread out below.
Taianyu, also known as "lump fish" (沱沱鱼), is a braised fish from the town of Tai'an, an important stop on the old Sichuan–Chongqing road where silver carp from the Jialing River are plentiful. The fish is cut into pieces, dusted in starch, then braised in a chilli-and-peppercorn sauce so the flesh stays silky and holds together while soaking up bold flavour. It comes either fully mala or made with pickled chillies (泡椒) for a sour-spicy edge. The dish has been listed as intangible cultural heritage in Chongqing — official confirmation that this is jianghu of the real, long-handed-down kind.
Laifengyu is fresh fish in the style of Laifeng town, in Bishan district — another key birthplace of jianghu cooking on the old Sichuan–Chongqing road. Whole fresh fish is cooked in a fierce, fragrant mala chilli sauce, the flesh staying firm and sweet because live river fish is used. Old restaurants in Bishan have been making this dish for more than forty years, and it counts as one of the three jianghu fish dishes Chongqing is proud of, alongside Tai'an fish and boiled fish in chilli oil. If you love your fish with serious heat, this is the one to seek out.