If its true, I will make reservations forthwith.
After reading that, I feel like I just watched an episode of the anime “Food Wars”. Well done.
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It’s not a rare spice in NYC, Upstate NY, DC, Boston or Illinois suburbs, so I really doubt it’s rare in Nevada. Asian markets have become fairly ubiquitous in the US, there’s over a dozen in the greater Las Vegas area. It’s also in spice specialty shops, which all major cities have, and places like World Market carry it, including in the Las Vegas locations.
ETA: And if they use a bunch of sichuan pepper, the chef and the restaurant likely know that. Why wouldn’t they just say that, rather than close their restaurant?
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I can’t imagine anyone intentionally wasting good cannabis like that…
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In Thai cooking, it would more likely be “makhwaen” rather than Szechuan peppercorn, but it’s a plant in the same family with the same effect.
The spice certainly isn’t rare or hard to get, yet for some reason its use (of appreciable amounts, anyways) is still pretty unusual - only after buying it mail order recently did I, for the first time in my life, get to try some fresh, potent Szechuan peppercorn. It was… a surprise. (To put it mildly.) The effect was orders of magnitude stronger than I had ever experienced, either in restaurants or cooking with it previously (which was, in retrospect, obviously because the spice had sat around or been mistreated such that it lost almost all its flavor and effect). It made me realize all the Szechuan food I’ve ever eaten in (US) restaurants didn’t use much (or perhaps any) of the stuff, and I’ve never noticed the use of the related South East Asian ingredient in Thai or Laotian restaurants. So if a restaurant actually used an amount that might be normal in Northern Thai cooking, it could easily be a shock to diners.
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