Orange County gains its own version of a San Gabriel Chinese restaurant famed for spicy Hunan recipes
Since 2008, Hengzhou Chilli King (also known as Hunan Chili King and Hunan Chilli King) has been serving a very specific take on regional Chinese food in Los Angeles County, focusing non-exclusively on Hunan dishes with three layers of spice – bright, acidic, and deep. Following the posting of signs announcing the arrival of “HN Chiliking,” a second location opened in Orange County in May 2026, interestingly at the same Costa Mesa-adjacent Santa Ana plaza with Mexican-Mediterranean hybrid FOB Grill, Islamic Chinese restaurant Taibat Noodle House, and the second location of 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 two visits, we’ve seen multiple two-person tables order nearly enough dishes to fill six-tops, then package up leftovers to bring home – a strategy we’d fully endorse…