By Paul Reidinger

ALTHOUGH THE REALM of restaurant names is a realm of wit and fancy, its vistas are mostly of the unpunctuated sort. Seldom will you see roaming so much as a comma or a period, let alone a question mark (though a Richmond café does bear that name, if a question mark counts as a name) or an exclamation point. But seldom does not mean never, and we have now the first restaurant in memory (that is, in my memory) to deploy an exclamation point as part of its public face. (I cannot speak for Hooters, a waterfront imminence; it might or might not be a restaurant and might or might not have an exclamation point – if it doesn't, it probably should. Memo to corporate, cc: Bill Clinton ...)

The restaurant is Spices!, which opened earlier in the spring in an old Lee's Deli space, from which Vietnamese-style sandwiches had been rather languidly purveyed. As the exclamation point strongly suggests, the languor has been banished, replaced by noise (noise!) from a blaring television and a thumping sound system, a near blinding color scheme of yellow and orange, a waiting-in-line-out-the-door (and mostly Asian, and mostly young) clientele, and – of course – food that is quite simply electrifying in its flavorful vigor.

Yes, we are talking big stimulation. We are talking no-way-out stimulation: if you're looking for a cozy booth to have a cozy conversation, look elsewhere. There are no booths at Spices!, and you probably couldn't have much of a conversation if there were anyway, because – apart from the noise – the spicy food is likely to leave your lips and tongue tingling, your forehead flushed, and beads of sweat forming on your brow. In other words, you will be in a state of bliss beyond the mean world of words.

The menu describes the food as "Szechuan trenz," and indeed many of the dishes can trace their provenance to that western Chinese province. But there are Taiwanese dishes too (generally less spicy, but very tasty), as well as (in a separate section of the menu) Shanghai trenz, for those who prefer to take a step or two away from the fire. For those who prefer to take a step or two – but not too many – toward the fire, the menu provides, in the form of red dots, a heat alert. The more dots, the hotter the food, naturally.

The menu even offers a dud. That would be the minced chicken corn soup ($4.95 for a medium bowl, which turned out to be huge), a pallid, viscous liquid we could not rescue from anemia even with salt, pepper, and soy sauce. This was all the more disappointing because the soup course on a previous visit – pickled cabbage with fish filet (also $4.95) – had been extraordinary, spicy-sour with ginger, hot chiles, and vinegar.

Taiwanese pork noodle ($4.95, immense) was listed among the noodle plates but with its small lake of spicy beef broth could easily have passed as a soup. The noodles in question were fat and spaghetti-like, the pork (served on the side and added by us) a heap of tender, just slightly crisp flaps still attached to knuckles of bone, the rest of the dish a colorful mix of green-and-white bok choy and yellow-and-white chopped hard-boiled egg.

That dish alone would make a decent lunch for two people, if they were restrained people. We were not. Moreover, we were curious about the kung paos, of chicken ($5.35) and calamari ($7.95). We went for the second at dinner after our server steered us away from braised calamari with scallion, a Shanghai preparation.

"Kung pao calamari is better," she told us.

There is no way for me now to know whether she was right, but I am inclined to think she was. Certainly the kung pao calamari was excellent, the seafood itself emerging from the wok still tender (anyone who has cooked calamari knows that it is not difficult to turn it rubbery tough, like bits of tire) and the thick sauce a translucent caramel color in which chunks of peanut and chopped scallion were suspended. The kung pao calamari bore a one-dot heat advisory, the kung pao chicken a two-dot warning, but we were unable to detect any difference other than a heavier harvest of dried whole red chiles in the latter. The heat of these warmed the lips just slightly, like the memory of a kiss.

Sizzling lamb with cumin ($7.95), on the other hand, was positively incendiary. My companion abandoned it after a couple of bites, but I soldiered happily on, growing red and sweaty in the process. And only slightly less potent was the formidably named numbing chile with shredded pork ($5.35), the chile in question being fresh and green and, like the pork, cut into julienne strips.