Chef Kevin Adey was sick of it. After long weeks behind the stove at Faro, all this Bushwick resident craved on his day off was some killer Szechuan food. But if he wanted the addictive thrum of tingling peppercorns and singeing chilies, he either had to hop on the L train or into the kitchen. So, he and his wife, Debbie, did what any owners of a beloved, successful Italian spot would do: They opened a Chinese restaurant.
At General Deb’s, their Szechuan shoebox down the street from Faro, vintage-frocked ladies and thick-bearded dudes spend their date night over slices of twice-cooked pork belly in fermented bean sauce (aggressively salty) or, say, silky slips of black bass bobbing blissfully in mala sauce (numbing oil—spot on!). It offers the food of Flushing, Queens, in a prototypical Brooklyn setting: cozy and sparse, with exposed brick, a tidy bar and walls painted chili-pepper red.
Similar to their pasta-centric Faro, the Adeys give major airtime to noodles: springy ones (dou hua mian), perfectly aflame in chili-bean sauce and soothingly soft tofu; thin ones (niu rou mian), awash in a sweet but skimpy cow’s-head broth and scented with anise and burnt onion; and familiar ones (dan dan mian), packed with ample ground pork and a strong surge of sesame, though the dish may be less saucy than you may like.
The predictable, but not particularly defensible, worry is that a chef bushwhacking into new culinary territory results in flavors muted and the soul diluted. This isn’t the case at General Deb’s. In fact, chef Adey sometimes even (gently) rejiggers Szechuan classics for the better, like the meaty shreds of boneless “bang bang” rabbit in a thick puddle of deep, dark sesame sauce or his two glaciers of silken tofu adrift in a brooding pork gravy that could go toe to toe with any mapo tofu in NYC.
As you eat, the spice, salt and prickling peppercorn converge from their respective dishes, building and vibrating to a fever pitch in your throat and face. You quench it for a moment with a tangle of cold-shredded potatoes or a gob of white rice, but it roars back, strong, fierce and heady as hell. This is the soul of Szechuan food, and General Deb’s captures it just right. Welcome to the neighborhood.
BY: DANIEL MEYER