The good news: Chinese restaurants far outnumber McDonald's in this country. The bad: most of those Chinese joints suck wontons. So discovering a real Chinese kitchen — one that specializes in authentic, intriguing, fearless (and fearsomely hot) dishes — is like unwrapping a fortune cookie with a strip of winning lottery numbers. And with Chef Liu's Chinese Restaurant, you'll hit the jackpot with stunning Szechuan dishes. The Szechuan beef, for example, arrives in a huge basin stained a deep crimson by the oil from too many chiles to count and studded with dozens of peppercorns, enough to numb all moving mouth parts. And yet this soup, bobbing with thin shards of beef and a forest of cilantro leaves, mysteriously releases a magnificent, multi-layered flavor combustion that you feel all the way to your toes. That's just one of the delights at Chef Liu's, where everything from the cumin-crusted lamb to the sesame pockets packaged with chicken and leeks is punctuated by a fortune of bold flavors.