LET'S SEE, last week we talked about love. I did most of the talking, I guess: Crawdad this, Crawdad that, love love blah blah blah. So it stands to reason, logically speaking, that this week I announce our big breakup. Well, I don't know where you studied logic, but I got my higher edgy-cation at the clam counter, Howard Johnson's, every single Wednesday between 1978 and 1987, in the company of great thinkers with great names like Moose, Bud, Louise, Tony, and old Crow Black Jack Masterson, you want to talk about on and on and on ...

Sit down girls (and bi-curious boys) ... I'm still a-takened. In fact, nothing could stop us now because we ate Indian food together, which, if you were paying attention at all six years ago when I said so, then you wouldn't need to read the rest of this column to figure out what the hell I'm talking about.

Eight years we been hokey-poked to each other, five of them officially, and never once, until last night, did me and Crawdad eat Indian food together – reason being that she broke up with her last several lovers before me in Indian restaurants. And it wasn't just a question of juju; there's a certain spice in Indian food which makes Crawdad's head spin around in complete circles, by way of an allergic reaction, leading not only to a twisted neck and tweaked upper back, but restricted oxygen to the brain, general all-out craziness, and, inevitably, arguments. Big, blow-out breakup ones.

So eating Indian food with her, relationshipwise, is like finding a dead fish head under your pillow, or pulling the eight of spades. However you want to look at it.

But I love Indian food, and Crawdad loves spicy food in general, including Indian food, and when we received in our mail a mailer for a new restaurant, Mission and Cortland, called Spicy Bite, specializing in Indian and Chinese food ... we both figured, well ... I could get Indian, she could get Chinese. Right?

OK, so far so good. Spicy Bite is a superfriendly, cozy corner restaurant with an exposed-pipe ceiling, niced up very nicely with wraparound plastic flowers. They got those fancy-pants designer hang-down lights, a two-and-a-half-foot strip of shiny metal sheeting screwed into the walls at tabletop level – don't ask me why. And the oddest touch of all is three backlit plug-in paintings, including, most spectacularly, a waterfall one with the water not only lit up but in motion, like water, ripples of light moving across the pool at the bottom of the painting too. It's the damnedest thing, and well worth the trip even if it is going to end in a broken heart.

Which it isn't – not for me. Although I did break several other internal organs I think in the process of eating my soup. And this is what I've been dying to tell you about: the soup. It's off the Chinese section of the menu, which is relatively small and very questionably Chinese.

The so-called hot-and-sour chicken soup ($2.99), for example, was like no hot-and-sour soup I've ever had in a Chinese restaurant. For starters it was nine-hundred thousand times better, a ton of tiny bits of still crunchy carrots, cabbage, green onions, red peppers, peas, and probably about 10 or 20 other things (not to mention the chicken, which was perfectly cooked, plump, and juicy), all adding up to the spiciest, zaniest, most medicinal, and most maddeningly delicious bowl of soup ever. More flavorful even than Vietnamese hot-and-sour, or tom ka gai.

I loved this soup, and at the same time I wanted to strangle it, it made me so mad. It drives me crazy when something tastes this good and you can't scarf it. I mean, this soup was so spicy I was sweating from places where I didn't know I had sweat glands.

Crawdad got the same thing only vegetable-style ($2.99), and it was the same with hers. Off the charts and out of this world. But she can take it, which isn't to say she didn't go crazy too. She even ate Indian food, we were so out-of-our-minds from the soup. It didn't matter. The Chinese stuff was basically Indian too, like gobi mansurian ($4.95), which is cauliflower with ginger, garlic, onions, and green things in an orange coriander sauce.

Chicken vindaloo ($7.95). Excellent, exceptionally tender chicken. Barra kabab ($9.95). Excellent, marinated and tandooried lamb chops with grilled peppers and onions, a side pile of cabbage, cucumber, tomato – nice cool-down stuff. In short: we survived, with flying colors and runny noses. And now Crawdad and me have our first-ever favorite Indian restaurant!

Spicy Bite. 3501 Mission (at Cortland), S.F. (415) 647-4036. Lunch: Tues.-Sun., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon., 5-10:30 p.m.; Tues.-Sun., 4:30-10:30 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout available. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible. Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).