Remember Cooper Black, that goofy, rotund 1980s font that you’d see on iron-on T-shirts? It’s the font currently adorning the green awnings outside this restaurant, which seems to be decorated like a Chinese person’s idea of what white suburban Americans think of Chinese food. Large aquariums of pouty fish, faux-bamboo railings, and a (shattered) window portrait of two fighting stallions scream “Lemon Chicken,” while a banner advertising “all-you-can-eat sushi” looks like unnecessary pandering. Especially once you try the food.

And we don’t mean the food off the menu they give you. If that were the only menu here, Szechuan Delight would be lucky to get a 6.5. No, friends, we mean the real menu. The mythical Second Menu. The authentic, Szechuan, barely-in-English menu, which you have to ask for specially.

Here, you will find starters like “Husband and Wife,” a cold serving of tongue, tripe, beef tendon, and other obscure cuts of cow in a brilliant salad that’s studded with Szechuan peppercorns, with fat and cartilage pockets. Follow this up with fish-head soup in a large earthen dish; the broth is impossibly nourishing, lightly salty and full of cabbage and free-floating chunks of pink meat.

These preparations are driven by the Szechuan peppercorn, that bizarre, delightful spice that numbs the mouth, makes you salivate like mad, and cross-reacts with all the stinging heat that makes these dishes so stimulating. (Try drinking water after eating a mouthful of it. It’s a trip.) You’ll find them in a sensational dish called “water pork,” tender strips of pork simmering in a deep red broth of chili oil and Szechuan peppercorns with baby bok choy. You’ll find an abundance of them, too, heating up beany, earthy ma la tofu, which looks and tastes like it was pressed fresh there on the premises. We’ve had curious diners desert their fried rice and General Tso’s, approach our bounty, and ask what everything was. “Is it spicy?” they ask, after we tell them.

There are easily three full pages worth exploring. The manager will only be happy to bring you this menu, but after multiple warnings. When did Americans become such wusses? It’s all that chop suey we ate in the 50’s. For even those people, there is Lion’s Head, succulent, enormous pork meatballs in a sensuous brown gravy and full of diced water chestnuts for a joyous crunch.

Ah, Szechuan Delight, you little sneak, looking tepid and harmless on your stretch of Hamden road. We’re going to tell on you.

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