HN Chiliking (Hunan Chilli King)
A San Gabriel Chinese restaurant famed for spicy Hunan recipes expands to Orange County
Since 2008, the San Gabriel restaurant Hengzhou Chilli King (also known as Hunan Chili King and Hunan Chilli King) has been serving Los Angeles County a very specific take on regional Chinese food, spotlighting Hunan dishes with three layers of spice – bright, acidic, and deep. Following the posting of signs announcing the arrival of “HN Chiliking,” May 2026 saw a new location open in Orange County, interestingly at the same Costa Mesa-adjacent Santa Ana plaza with Mexican-Mediterranean hybrid FOB Grill, Islamic Chinese restaurant Taibat Noodle House, and einspanner drink specialist Febe Coffee. The new HN Chiliking replaces Cajun-ish restaurant Ritter’s Steam Kettle Cooking, which closed in 2023, and looks completely different in all regards. Its open, brightly-lit dining room seats around 100 people and features an oversized television on one wall, plus a small “VIP room” with capacity for an additional dozen or so people.
Laminated and professionally bound, the restaurant’s extended menu is labelled “Hunan Chilli King,” and opens with a “special remind[er]” that all dishes can be customized as non-spicy, mild, medium, hot, or extra-hot to customer preferences. Roughly 125 dishes are almost all entree-sized, notably without small appetizer or small dessert portions, which means that practically everything is intended for sharing. Across multiple visits, we’ve seen many two- or three-person tables order nearly enough dishes to fill six-tops, then package up leftovers to bring home – a strategy we’d fully endorse.
On our first visit, a server kindly flagged these large portions when we attempted to order what in retrospect would certainly have been too much for a single meal; on our second visit, the same server confirmed that there were no “small” plates on the menu, and on our third visit, we ordered a dessert soup that needed bucket-shaped takeout containers to store. You might be able to suss this out from the clear official photographs, but they provide little sense of scale, and the prices (between $11 and $29 for most dishes, averaging $20-$24) aren’t as different from inflation-adjusted typical cartons of Chinese takeout as one might expect. It turns out that three dishes are more than enough to stuff even a hungry person, so if you’re looking to really explore HN Chiliking’s menu, come with an adventurous group.
Many of the dishes look familiar enough on the surface. Cumin and red chilis feature prominently in diced boneless chicken and savory fish dishes; offal such as tripe and pork intestines compete with pork trotters and chicken feet on savory and/or spicy plates, commonly paired with bamboo shoots, celery, radishes, or hot peppers. Most of the options are deep-fried, stir-fried, simmered, or stewed, with numerous vegetarian-centered entrees (eggplant, seaweed, Chinese yam, potatoes) complementing beef, shrimp, lamb, duck, frog, and crayfish dishes. Noodles and dumplings are small parts of the menu, but available, with pickled vegetables and salads as the only real appetizers. Each table gets a plate of cold pickled vegetables (beans and cabbage or varied salad items) to snack on for free, as well as a bowl of almost flavorless corn soup that is in our view HN Chiliking’s only miss. Unless you’re looking for something as bland as can be – if so, why are you here? – just skip it.
The execution of virtually all the dishes we ordered across our first two visits was superlative. HN Chiliking offers multiple versions of a crispy rice entree: “Three delicacies” includes shrimp, broccoli, and cauliflower ($27), but we went with one from the “must-order dishes” list called wok-fried yellow cattle beef with crispy rice crust ($24). What arrived was a large dish with a mountain of multi-dimensionally spiced beef slices on top, each dense with an umami-rich soy marinade overlaid with bright and deep spices, completely covering mini rice krispie-sized bars of savory, crispy rice and a chili oil sauce. We couldn’t believe how much there was to eat here, but also couldn’t stop eating combined beef and crunchy rice bites until everything was gone. It was magnificent, with a default level of heat that we’d call more complex than either Sichuan-style burning or numbing hot; a second order (on our fourth visit) was equally excellent, plating the rice more obviously from the start.
Another “must-order” dish, billed on the menu as “spicy garlic crayfish” ($30) but clearly made solely with prawns, had an equivalently huge mountain of salted shellfish that seemed never-ending at the time, mixed with a comparatively modest collection of sliced yellow peppers and full garlic cloves. Every prawn was good enough to eat from head to tail, but we ran out of room to finish them all.
Less essential but still delicious were the three items we tried on our second visit. A pickled cucumber peel salad ($11) was powerfully spiced by default with chopped red and green chilis, using aging and fermentation to turn normally forgotten vegetable skins into almost seaweed-like ribbons; this was the smallest and most appetizer-sixed dish we found, yet still generously portioned. (Cold tossed shredded kelp ($13), ordered on our fourth visit, didn’t look quite like its menu photo thanks to what appeared to be more rigid green noodles than seaweed; it remains the only HN Chiliking dish we’ve opted not to finish.)
Mom-style steamed eggplant ($17) also didn’t look much like its soft, flat menu photo as its sliced whole purple eggplant pieces tasted more oven-crisped after being unearthed from a huge pile of peppers; despite any evidence of steaming, the eggplant was excellent. Old Hengyang-style sour and spicy rice noodles ($17), ordered extra spicy, was like a large bowl of traditional Chinese hot and sour soup with two scoops of ground pork and soft white wheat noodles mixed in – again, not as spicy as we might have imagined, but entirely worth experiencing. Stir-fried lamb ($24) was also delicious, even if it was just an oversized portion of thin-sliced lamb, peppers, cilantro, and soy-chili oil.
It took until our third visit to have a merely “good” meal at HN Chiliking. This time, we tried stir-fried pork intestines in fiery sauce ($23), which although ordered “hot spicy” was simultaneously less fiery and saucy than we’d expected – more like a Chongqing chicken with fried offal. We also ordered braised pork belly with tofu puffs ($22), a gently assembled, soy-heavy collection of soft pork cubes and circular tofu slices that is said to have been a favor of China’s Chairman Mao, and was rich in meat and fat, yet mild enough for anyone. On the other hand, we weren’t thrilled with steamed pork dumplings ($17/10), a large but fully forgettable soup dumpling variant with thick, doughy skins and little broth inside, served with a sharp black vinegar dip. Most supermarket freezer soup dumplings are as compelling as these.
Sweet options are limited at HN Chiliking, but the first dessert item we sampled was akin to hitting a jackpot. Caramelized banana and pineapple ($19) was a multi-person plate of brown sugar-glazed, golden battered fruit chunks served with a light dusting of sesame seeds. Thanks to the glaze, which was fully liquid hot on delivery, we’d characterize this simple dessert as nearly the stuff of dreams – typical fried banana taken to two or three higher levels because of the crispy external texture, sweetness, and alternation with lightly sour pineapple chunks. Even after consuming way too much beforehand, it gave us another “so big, must eat everything” experience we couldn’t stop thinking about (and gleefully relived at the end of our fourth HN Chiliking meal).
On our third visit, we ordered sweet fruit wine rice balls ($19), an overwhelmingly large bowl of warm, sweet rice wine broth that was supposed to contain fruit and rice balls, but instead was fruitless with thin shreds of egg and chewy, black sesame-filled rice balls – very tasty, but like a few other dishes, not exactly as pictured on the menu. The only other choices are a sweet chilled tomato salad ($13) and deep-fried coconut durian balls ($14), the latter a set of 15 or more rice-speckled golden treats – assuming, of course, you’re a fan of the famously stinky fruit’s acquired taste. You may or may not be offered cookies at the end of your meal; one time, we received a fortune cookie and two rice crackers, another time two foil-wrapped biscuit bundles, and another nothing at all. We enjoyed whichever we received, but liked the pineapple-shaped and -flavored biscuits the most.
Just as was the case with Irvine’s Spicy Master and Tustin’s Long He, we enjoyed our first visit to HN Chiliking so much that we felt compelled to quickly go back and explore more of the menu – a choice that was rewarded by even more deliciousness, while leaving plenty of additional compelling options to sample. While not everything is either amazing or stunningly spicy here, the quality level is generally very high, with far more hits than misses. We look forward to returning again in the near future.
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Table
Open Since: May 2026
Address
1421 W. MacArthur Blvd.
Suite G
Santa Ana, CA 92704
714.486.3232