By Paul Reidinger

EVERY FEBRUARY FOR the better part of a decade, a friend of mine has thrown an all-out Chinese New Year's bash at a Chinese restaurant that changes every year but is always higher end. It is a glorious, and fairly wine-sodden, tradition that brings to a close our elongated holiday season. It has also amounted to a tour of the city's grander Chinese establishments (as well as a grand Vietnamese establishment and a place in Daly City). The food (usually at least eight courses, each wreathed in the mystique of the past in a faraway land) is being analyzed and compared long before we are served our green-tea ice cream or our lychee nuts, and while I always say it is good – because it always is good – I never say what I really think, which is that I wish it were bolder.

The best Chinese food, for me, isn't fancy or elaborate or wreathed in mystique, but spicy. It begs for cold beer. It is Szechuan or Hunan, fired with chile peppers, littered with chopped scallions, perfumed with ginger and garlic. You can find that sort of food in San Francisco, but because this is not really a Szechuan or Hunan town, you have to sift a bit. But even the most assiduous sifting is unlikely to reveal a place with food better than at Melisa's, one of the most deeply unassuming Chinese restaurants I've ever been to in this or any city, and certainly one of the best – worthy of hosting our Chinese New Year's bacchanal, if the choice were up to me (it isn't), though of course we would have to cart in our own wine, and probably an item or two to hang on the wall, just to relieve some of the starkness. Or we could just settle for cold beer and be done with it.

Say this for starkness: at least you are not distracted from the dishes being set before you. The lack of ornamentation (beyond neatly set tables, a few framed watercolors, and some emergency spotlights) amounts to a kind of mild sensory-deprivation effect in which you are able to perceive only the tastiness of the food and marvel that you are eating so very well in so unlikely a setting. In that respect Melisa's resembles another tiny ethnic eatery in the Richmond, Thai Time; each reminds us that some of the best food in the city is so-called ethnic food cooked in little storefront spots you wouldn't even notice if you weren't looking.

Some of the liveliest dishes bear Melisa's name, as with Melisa's spicy chicken ($4.25 at lunch), a jumble of breaded and deep-fried pieces of boneless poultry in an amber honey sauce that discreetly blazes with chile heat mellowed by the honey's sweetness. Preceded by a cup of hot and sour soup that really is hot (in both senses of the word), the spicy chicken has more than enough zip to satisfy the most demanding of chile tooths.

Capsicum heat pervades virtually all of the dishes carrying the name "Melisa," but it isn't limited to them. Triple crowns ($8.95), for instance – a blowout array of prawns, chicken, and beef, with abundant lengths of spring-green chopped scallion – featured a spicy ginger-garlic sauce I could only describe as "incredibly good" in my scrawled notes: a perfect balance of heat, savoriness, and viscosity we finished off with spoonfuls of the usually superfluous steamed white rice.

On the other hand, not every dish is incendiary. Half a roast duck ($8.25), for instance, was scented with cinnamon-influenced five-spice powder, a flavorful and slightly exotic concoction that doesn't make your nose run. The bird had been kept in the oven until its skin turned a rich, crisp gold and was then served, cut into pieces, on a simple white platter.

And broccoli and cashew prawns ($5.25 at lunch) would be suitable for the most delicate of palates. While we found it to be well seasoned and flavorful, its chief appeal was textural: crunchy cashews, tender-crisp broccoli florets, and al dente prawns (fully peeled, so that one was not repeatedly having to deal with inedible bits of shell and tail).