Before this leather menu covers, though, cold sesame noodles in New York were the specialty of one particular Sichuan-born chef, Yu Fa Tang. Called Shorty by everybody, Tang came here in the early ’60s after working for more than a decade in Taiwan. By 1967 he had his own restaurant on East Broadway, Hwa Yuan Szechuan Inn, where among other renditions of Sichuanese food he made cold sesame noodles that would lodge themselves in the memories of generations of New Yorkers and be imitated, lamentably, by takeout cooks all over town. At its peak it reportedly went through 500 pounds of noodles a day.

For more details on the background of the dish and its life after the restaurant closed, I refer you to a 2007 treatise that Sam Sifton wrote in The New York Times Magazine. For a taste of the original and unexpurgated recipe, I refer you to the very good new restaurant that opened on the site of the original in October. Its name now shortened to Hwa Yuan Szechuan, it is worth visiting for reasons that go well beyond nostalgia.

Hwa Yuan is an imposing restaurant, built by Shorty’s son Chien Lieh Tang and his grandson James Tang to plant the family name solidly in this century. To the left of the entrance is a lounge where translucent backlit panels cast everything in a streaked-marmalade glow. Straight ahead is the first dining room, and there are more up the stairs to the right.

The tables sit under white cloths, and the places are set with white china traced with gold. To the right of the plates are two pairs of chopsticks on a white-china rest, one for serving and the other for eating.

Needless to say, the cold sesame noodles are mandatory, at least on a first visit. They are, for one thing, truly cold. Not left-out-on-the-counter cold, but trickling-mountain-spring cold. The temperature accentuates their smooth surface and, like the slivers of cucumber, makes the small zap of chile oil call out more clearly. The first time I ate them the sauce needed a little more salt and vinegar, but the next time it had a finely balanced tension. If you know only the sugary peanut-butter imitation, tasting Hwa Yuan’s original must be like hearing Van Morrison for the first time when you’ve grown up on Ed Sheeran.

Chien Lieh Tang is the chef at the resurrected Hwa Yuan, and although his cooking is not hard to appreciate, a little orientation may help. First, a warning: Those who believe that the only good Sichuan food makes you weep, sniffle, moan, call 911 or crawl under the table will need to adjust their standards. Hwa Yuan serves many family recipes that reflect an earlier stage of Sichuan cooking and Shorty Tang’s time in Taiwan. While chiles are often present, they rarely dominate. Nor does the kitchen try to lard extra umami into every dish. The best food at Hwa Yuan tries to impress through charm, not arm-twisting.

Family pride being the point here, dishes that carry the names Tang or Hwa Yuan tend to be excellent. Not, I’m afraid, the Hwa Yuan dry-aged shell steak, which got impressive flavor from basting with marrow but was knotted with tough membranes when I tried it.

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But Tang’s Amazing Spicy Wine Chicken was a treat, very tender hunks of dark meat in a delicate sauce of Shaoxing rice wine, bean paste and chile oil. Tang’s Amazing Tofu was a minor discovery, seared squares of pressed tofu with fresh green chiles in a sauce that’s more interesting than you’d guess from its pale tan color. Hot Tang Tang noodles may sound like cold sesame noodles run through the microwave; they are something completely different, short strands of noodle in a steaming cup of sour-and-spicy broth that has a businesslike edge of roasted dried chiles.

And Whole Fish with Hot Bean Sauce, Tang Family Creation is a bona fide star, the dish I know I’ll order again even if I’m not in the mood for cold noodles. It had a devoted following at the original restaurant, where it was made with carp. Now it is barramundi, precisely cooked and resting in a rusty mash of chile oil, fermented soybeans and chopped scallions. It’s a forceful dish that’s still noteworthy for its balance.

As for the Hwa Yuan crab cake, I have no idea whether it lives up to the name. The kitchen was always out of it, along with such other intrigues as duck liver pâté and foie gras with fruit.

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Eating in that city can be a wild ride, but the dining rooms often have an oversize, mall-like scale and the menu covers a safe, something-for-everyone vagueness — qualities that, transplanted to New York, can be real buzzkills. As far as restaurants go, what happens in Vegas should usually stay in Vegas.

But a lot has happened in the past six years. Some is too painful to recount, but luckily not the story of the Tetsu on Leonard Street, which finally opened in November.

It has little in common with the Nevada iteration, which will close in April. The animating idea there was teppanyaki, sizzled on flattop steel grills set into big half-moon tables that cooks stood behind, like blackjack dealers. But Mr. Takayama dropped that notion in Manhattan; now his leather menu covers are dominated by food prepared on robata grills operated behind a dining counter, supplemented widely by other techniques: raw seafood, soups, slaws, fried stuff.

The roomy, half-empty white-and-beige interior of the casino Tetsu looks nothing like the shadowy and thickly settled Leonard Street Tetsu. Iron columns, steel seats, brick walls and wood floorboards give the place the look of an after-hours downtown lounge from a few years ago, before Industrial got self-conscious and became Steampunk.

The prices are also much lower than they were in Las Vegas, or in a sample menu Mr. Takayama floated for TriBeCa in 2012. Only a handful of items on the two-page dinner menu cost more than $20. Can this be the same chef who collects $595 a person, before tax, for dinner at Masa? Who sells a bowl of chopped tuna belly with caviar for $68 next door at BarMasa and $78 at Kappo Masa, across town?

One and the same. True, Tetsu specializes in small plates, but then none of Mr. Takayama’s other restaurants are particularly known for supersizing. What Tetsu does differently is to put away the luxury ingredients that are so central to Masa’s experience and image. At last, New York has a chance to see just how good Mr. Takayama is when he isn’t hiding behind truffles and caviar.

He can, in fact, make less expensive seafood taste as precious as sturgeon roe. During the bay scallop season, which has an annoying habit of ending before I have eaten enough of them, Tetsu seared them with skinny lengths of asparagus and sent them out with garlic-anchovy oil and lime juice, simmering in a hot bowl. I will be marking this on the calendar so I don’t miss it next winter. For now there is a similar dish that operates on the same principle: tender, palm-size whole octopus sizzled in butter and lime with garlic, chopped cilantro and strands of a green Korean chile.

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The biggest surprise was how much I liked the salads. The menu calls them slaws, which goes a long way toward repairing some of the injuries that word has absorbed over the decades. There is a superb one with fresh kale and fried burdock in an unexpectedly Southeast Asian lemongrass dressing, and another of cabbage and roasted duck stirred with, yes, mayonnaise. (No supermarket mayo, it’s flavored with fresh orange juice and sherry vinegar.) If there was yuzu in the yuzu-daikon slaw, though, it had walked off the job the night I tried it.

Items from the robata, supposedly the heart of the restaurant, were more variable than you would hope. My table went quietly wild for the soy-marinated quail eggs and the pink pork sausage with flecks of yellow and green Thai chiles. Skewered coconut shrimp received polite nods.

When you get the menu, though, your eyes will automatically go straight to the raw seafood, and they probably should. It appears twice, the first time in chilled appetizers that can share some of Masa’s delicacy and subtle use of spice. Speckles of finely minced jalapeños dot little pearly pink bites of hamachi; in a more ordinary case, wasabi has been quickly grated over hunks of yellowfin tuna with a spoonful of simple guacamole.

Raw seafood reappears at the end of the menu as hand rolls and nigiri. Here I have a confession to make: Almost all of my outer-stratosphere moments at Masa happened before the barrage of sushi that ends the meal. Near the end of the game comes a mesmerizing hand roll stuffed with meltingly fatty tuna belly, but the nigiri on its own it would probably not land Masa in my top tier of sushi destinations.

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To join Dickey’s Big Yellow Cub Club and receive members-only specials and discounts, click here.

“Dickey’s Barbecue Pit continues to offer authentic, Texas-style barbecue across the nation,” says Laura Rea Dickey, CEO of Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. “We are proud to expand in California and congratulate Owner/Operators Michael and Margarita Tucker on opening their second store out of what will be seven altogether.”

The opening festivities will last four weeks and include:

Thirsty Thursdays: Guests will receive a free Big Yellow Cup with free refills all day.

Philanthropy Fridays: “You Give, We Give” – All uniformed officers will receive 50 percent off their meal.

Singer/Songwriter Saturdays: Enjoy tunes from local musicians every Saturday for the next four weeks.

Kids Eat Free Sundays: Kids eat free with an adult purchase of $10 or more.

An award-winning entrepreneur, Michael Tucker also owns several franchises with Dallas-based convenience store 7-Eleven. “We believe in what we do, and we are proud to serve pit smoked, Texas-style barbecue to Moreno Valley,” Tucker says.

To find the Dickey’s Barbecue Pit nearest you, click here.

Dickey’s Barbecue Pit in San Marcos is located at 12620 Day Street, Moreno Valley, CA 92553. The phone number is 951-653-1340.

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To learn more about joining the Dickey’s Barbecue Pit family go to www.dickeys.com/franchise or call 866-340-6188.

About Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants, Inc.
Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., the nation’s largest barbecue chain with huge cheap menu covers was founded in 1941 by Travis Dickey. Today, all meats are still slow smoked on-site in each restaurant. The Dallas-based family-run barbecue franchise offers eight signature meats, seven savory sides, tangy barbecue sauce and free kids’ meals every Sunday. The fast-casual concept has expanded to nearly 600 locations in 44 states. In 2016, Dickey’s won first place on Fast Casual’s “Top 100 Movers and Shakers” list. Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has also been recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine, Franchise Times, and Nation’s Restaurant News. For more information on Dickey’s awards, visit www.dickeys.com.

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