Numbing peppercorns, braised silky tofu, deep savoury flavours and a punch of freshness. Mapo tofu is a dish like no other.

This is an edited excerpt from Two Bear Sandwich Club, a Substack newsletter by Nick Iles.

It is a sad truth that one of the lesser spoken outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic was, and is, the resurgence of animosity and racism directed at the Chinese community. It wasn’t just a phenomenon felt in New Zealand, Chinese restaurants across London, New York, and other major cities became ghost towns during early reporting of the outbreak. This bias and othering of communities can come in many forms. The food of Asia is often relegated to the lists of the cheapest places to eat in a city; a guide for students and tourists to grab carb-rich food devoid of skills. This purposeful lowering of culture is consistent with the gatekeeping of ideas and the othering of anyone to be excluded from society.

I don’t claim any shared history with mapo tofu or the rich culture in which it originated, but I am an avid and voracious supporter of the form. Like the person that throws the roses on the stage in tears after the opera singer has performed their final note, or the child, also in tears, that the television camera zooms in on as their team lifts the world cup trophy.

I have eaten a whole lot of mapo tofu and I’m here to tell you all about it. This is not an empirical evaluation of the objective quality of each dish and thereby of those making it, rather a wholly subjective take on what I think is tasty. One thing to concede is that outside of China it is very unlikely that what we are eating is a traditional mapo tofu, rather a gentrified version, light on heat and spice and designed to appease a more delicate western palette.

Mapo tofu, or the far more gruesome “pockmarked old woman” tofu, is a dish that is said to have first developed in Chengdu, Sichuan, in the mid 19th century. It was designed to fill up and energise weary labourers as they made their way past the small house of the old lady with the pocked face making it. The rich and filling braised tofu and numbing peppercorns combined with ground beef (traditionally) has proven irresistible ever since and has subsequently been widely adapted.

There is no real definition of exactly what mapo tofu needs to have in it, more a checklist of what you would hope to experience. First and foremost is that numbing quality you can only get with Sichuan peppercorns – that feeling that each mouthful is probably going to be your last until you inevitably come crawling greedily back like a drug-addled fiend. Then you hope to have the heat of chilli oil, that deep savouriness from fermented bean pastes and a welcome freshness from spring onion and shredded chilli.

Texturally you want everything soft and tender. The challenge is to use a tofu that is so silken that it almost evaporates and wisps away as you eat, but with enough integrity to survive the cooking process without being eviscerated. When put in front of you there should be an immediacy to the aroma, the fragrance of the peppercorns almost perfuming the air around you. All of this while somehow staying fresh. It is a dish rich with ferments and ground pork but the aromatics should balance this and maintain a clarity that should never be cloying. These are all the players in the orchestra, the tune any restaurant chooses to play is totally up to them. In no particular order:

Magic Kitchen

7 Courtenay Place, Te Aro

A gateway mapo tofu

One of the key elements of mapo tofu is the aroma and fragrance as you lean in, and Magic Kitchen understands this. Fresh ginger, chilli and spring onion are responsible and they also provide another of the key elements – freshness. Big, inch-thick-cut chunks of silken tofu bob in the viscous sauce in various states of decay. Poached before entering the sauce, the tofu maintains the perfect barely-holding-together texture we all want. They go heavy on the meat here, for me maybe too heavy. The ground pork should provide a savoury edge to the tofu, whereas here it feels like the tofu is folly to the meat and hasn’t been quite browned off all the way. That numbing heat is there in the background and gently builds with each mouthful, but the lack of physical peppercorns in the sauce means it is very mild. A very solid gateway mapo tofu for those nervous of spice but wanting to feel the tang from a safe distance.

FJ Noodles & Dumplings

45 Courtenay Place, Te Aro

Probably not mapo tofu 

The first thing that will strike anyone that orders this dish is that, well, it isn’t mapo tofu. It is bright brown in colour, flecked with frozen peas, carrots and sweetcorn, and has no real sauce of which to speak. It is one of the cheaper options, but when you dig under the tofu and frozen veg, it is really just a massive box of rice – so maybe not as good value as it at first seems. And that tofu – instead of the silken, slippery tofu that makes this dish what it is, here you get fried puffed tofu that is chewy and dense. On the plus side, there is a real fermented tang working through the sauce. But really the whole dish is sickly sweet and processed tasting due to the lack of szechuan peppercorns or chilli of any kind.

KC Cafe

39A Courtenay Place, Te Aro

Brilliant on its day 

I love KC Cafe. This has been well documented and it is somewhere I go to more than any other, but part of the thrill is you never quite know exactly what a dish will be like. I have eaten the mapo tofu there at least five times and it is never quite the same. At its best there is silken tofu being held together as if by magic, like wind it is so delicate. Sometimes it is barely numbing at all, but on good days there is heat and it is relentless. The last couple of visits have had very little in the way of fermented tang and chilli oil, meaning most of the savoury flavour is coming from the ground pork. Sometimes there will be spring onion, and on its day it can be light and refreshing and all of the things we want. Ordering the mapo tofu here can be a risk, but it is a risk I will continue to take. On its day, it is the second best mapo tofu in town.

Top Kitchen

127a Cuba Street, Te Aro

Up there with the best

I’m not going to mess around here: this is probably the best mapo tofu in Wellington. Visually it is a beautiful looking plate, a deep rusty brown gravy binds tofu of different sizes together with flecks of bright herbs and chilli. The texture is perfect, large chunks of tofu broken down and all different sizes but all with the thinnest of skins barely holding the sweetness together. The intensity of numbing builds, cracked Sichuan peppercorns are scattered everywhere and provide the addictive quality we are all looking for. Fermented bean paste adds an earthiness that is inventively bolstered by the umami of ground mushrooms, an unorthodox addition that absolutely has a place in the dish. The pork is used sparingly, acting as a savoury seasoning rather than a main ingredient while chilli oil adds a colour and vibrancy to the whole thing. Whatever way you interrogate it, this is without doubt up there with the best mapo tofu in Wellington.

Majestic Cuisine

11B Courtenay Place, Te Aro

Remarkable in its complexity

Half mapo tofu, half Sichuan stew, this bowl feels closest to the idea of the original dish and its original purpose: that old lady, filling up a big pan with beef, fermented beans and all that tofu to feed weary construction workers and travellers. Here at Majestic they are generous: the bowl is packed with heavily browned pork, perfectly silken tofu and an array of other treats. There are chunks of mushroom, a scattering of peas and even small, sweet prawns. All of this alongside the things you would hope to see: fresh spring onion and thick fragrant fingers of ginger. Centimetre hunks of hot red chilli and piles of cracked sichuan peppercorns make this the hottest of all the dishes – always building, but always retreating. It is truly remarkable in its complexity, you find yourself exploring through the dish, discovering pockets of deep fermented sourness before hitting on rich seams of intense heat and fragrance. It is the dish I return most often to for a treat.