Have I told you how good this chicken is?” Mr Greedy asks. “It’s really unbelievable. I’ve never had anything quite like it in my life. Really quite extraordinary,” he continues, pausing only to stare open-mouthed at another bubbling dish being placed carefully in front of him.

It really was a sight to behold. Black, ornate and calligraphic, the large bowl held the ‘house speciality fish’ but what we witnessed was a sea of red chillies, resplendent as they bobbed away on our table.

Next the waiters appeared with several ladles and very ceremonially began spooning off the chillies to reveal the fish cooking away underneath, which they then spooned on to our plates. What a show!

And yet My Sichuan Restaurant, in Gloucester Green, is not an elaborate place, as Jon Lewis’s photographs show. The walls are fairly bare and painted in magnolia, the decor is ill-matched and, as the dining area of the former Old School is so vast, there are lots of empty tables, and bad acoustics.

But, reassuringly, as we were the only non-Orientals in situ (always a good sign), we persevered.

But a word of warning: My Sichuan Restaurant is a Chinese Chinese restaurant, so if you fancy sweet and sour pork, fried rice and spring rolls, go somewhere else. If not, throw out the rule book and start again, because the ingredients are entirely foreign, all the dishes turn up at once, and whatever you order, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out anyway. Some came in vats of boiling fat, others in a red spicy broth, raw or delicately shaped in parcels and stuffed with meat. It’s a lottery either way, a lucky dip that doesn’t disappoint.

The menu offers tripe, trotters, intestines, ducks’ tongues, and pigs’ ears. Jellyfish, thousand-year-old eggs, sea snails and frogs’ legs were also on offer, causing my stomach to lurch as our eyes desperately scanned the menu for something familiar to latch on to, until we realised there wasn’t anything, and that we should just let go of our intrinsic culinary expectations and go with the flow.

So we did, trying as many new things as possible and eating them when they turned up rather than in the formal English sequence. We tried egg and tomato soup (£2.80), the house speciality hot and sour soup (£2.80) which blew the top of your head off, Mr Greedy’s exceptional ‘mouth-watering Sichuan chicken with a lip-tingling sauce’ (£7.80). Then the fish (£18) with boiled rice (£2), some crushed cucumber in garlic sauce (£4.80), potato noodles with peppers (£6), Sichuan noodles with mince on top (£3.50), a portion of wonton (£3.50), pork dumplings (£3.50) attached on a delicate grid a bit like an Airfix kit, beautifully garnished with coloured lilies made from sculpted noodles.

And with every mouthful we moaned and groaned our way through the meal like porn stars, until finally we ground to a halt, looking around us in a daze, wondering what had just happened. I’m still not sure, but if you fancy going way out of your culinary comfort zone, and pushing the boat out, then enjoy the roller-coaster ride that awaits you at My Sichuan Restaurant.