Not all of New York’s best food is in Manhattan. Some of the foods of its most recent immigrants are to be found in the busy outer boroughs where the real estate may be undistinguished but this is also where starched tablecloths and powerful maître d’s are irrelevant. These boroughs are where many immigrants have settled, often in large numbers, and the restaurants here cater to their own people, inexpensively and authentically.

About 30 minutes from Times Square in Manhattan, less than a dozen stops away on the express, number 7 subway line, in the borough of Queens, there is a restaurant that I have flagged in my notebook, “Unlike any other Sichuan restaurant in America”. The train, nicknamed the Orient Express, chugs along outdoors after leaving Manhattan, dives into the bowels of the earth again as it nears its last stop, Main Street, Flushing. You climb out and begin walking along the cross street, Roosevelt Avenue, to Prince Street. Turn right on Prince and not too far along, on the right, is Spicy & Tasty. Not a name I would pick but it delivers just what it says in the sign above the door (its Mandarin name, Imperial Kitchen, is grander). Flavoured with hot red peppers – whether in the form of chilli oil or a variety of chilli sauces, some mild and slightly sweet and others breathing Vesuvian fires – as well as with garlic, sesame seeds and tongue-numbing Sichuan peppercorns, the food here is authentically from Sichuan, and nothing short of spectacular.