Burning of the taste buds

Yesterday was my parents' last night in San Diego. For a special treat, we decided to take my parents to Ba Ren, an authentic Szechuan restaurant. I don't think I've ever been to a REAL Szechuan restaurant. When I opened up the menu, this is the sight I was greeted with:

I have never seen so many hot pepper signs on a menu EVER! Dave took his mom and grandma here, and they raved about it. Also, there's this foodie in San Diego that has the best food blog I've ever seen (click here) and this is his most favorite place (as shown here).

This was a pretty cool experience because most of the food was new to me and my parents.

So we started off with an appetizer which was a combination of bamboo shoots, ears (yup, ears. one of my favorites!), and some thinly sliced meat and tendon marinated in some spicy sauce. All very good.
We ordered 3 entrees:
The first was fried tripe (I think?) with some mixed preserved and fresh veggies. Just so you know, I normally hate tripe when it's all small and white with those little frilly things. Yuck. But dang, THIS was GOOD.

Our second dish was crispy rice with chicken, squid, sea cucumber, and veggies. This was interesting. It was like a pan-fried noodle dish, but instead of noodles, you got rice. The rice was kinda strange, it was like blocks of rice crispies. It was good, too (although I think I prefer the noodles).

When our third dish came out, we all started laughing. Take a close look at this picture. I don't think I've ever seen soooooo many peppers in a dish before! I think it's called Chung King Style Chili with Chicken (battered and fried chicken bits covered with fried dried red chilis). I was so scared of this dish, but the chicken looked so tasty, I had to try it. So I pick one piece of chicken and took off ALL the chilis and seeds and everything. Mmmmmm, yummy. The chili flavor was tasty and picking all the things down kept the spicy-ness bearable (there was much water and rice consumed that evening).
Warning: Keeping that chicken dish for leftovers is a little dangerous. We had about half leftover and brought it home. My parents, my bro, and I ate some at lunch today. Whoo-hee! It definitely built up some kick overnight! And if you pick off all the peppers, you'll start realizing that over 50% of the dish is comprised of the hot peppers, NOT the chicken!

Ha ha ha... this was a fun place. I'd highly recommend it!