Chen Mapo Doufu

Chen Mapo Doufu is said to have started in the early 1860s as a small roadside eatery serving porters at the Wanfu Bridge in Chengdu's northern outskirts. The owner's wife, surnamed Liu, whose face bore light pockmarks and who was nicknamed "Pock-marked Granny Chen," cooked the tofu, beef, and oil her customers carried into a fiery dish so good it gave the house its name.

It is among the oldest and most representative Sichuan-cuisine brands surviving in Chengdu, recognized as a China Time-Honored Brand in 1995, and the mapo tofu it created has become one of Sichuan's signature dishes carried across China and abroad.

Its mapo tofu chases eight qualities, numbing, spicy, piping hot, fragrant, crisp, tender, fresh, and lively, using soft tofu and minced beef with Pixian broad-bean paste, ground chili, and Sichuan pepper, stir-cooked over a fierce flame, thickened, and finished with a dusting of pepper for its numbing aroma, a textbook of Sichuan's mala flavor.

As a China Time-Honored Brand, Chen Mapo Doufu carries forward more than a century of mapo-tofu cookery and is a living window onto the origins of Sichuan's numbing-and-spicy taste.