Not that the kitchen avoids spices. One reason to keep your wits about you while eating at Guan Fu is that you can’t always tell when extreme heat is about to rain down like Judgment Day.

One of the hottest things on the menu, the Guan Fu-style cuttlefish salad, contains almost no red chiles. Its ability to shock and amaze comes from fresh green chiles that are roasted until black, skinned and made into a sauce that tastes almost Mexican. Barely cooked cuttlefish are scored with a knife so they twist up and look like little pine cones. That potent green sauce insinuates itself into every one of their crevices.

This is one of many Guan Fu dishes that are rarely seen in New York, if ever. The menu is about 40 glossy pages long and full of color photographs of coral groupers, crystal crabs and other sea animals. In some parts it looks like a children’s book, although the kids won’t like the way the story ends for the soft-shell turtle.

If you order one, a live specimen is brought out for inspection and reappears a short time later in pieces, mingled with potatoes, green beans and pickled cherry peppers. Its shell lies over the dish like a green cloche. Tradition dictates that the oldest person at the table has first crack at the chewy rim of fat around the edge. (At my table, that honor went to me. It and the soft cartilage were the most interesting parts of the animal; the meat was like fish-flavored chicken.)

Not all the exotic imported species were available when I went, and others were offered at prices that scared me off. They are, presumably, meant for other customers who can afford to pay for a taste of home. Guan Fu, which joins a cluster of restaurants under the Hyatt Place hotel in the One Fulton Square real estate venture, is a reflection of the new money that is starting to transform this end of Flushing. The owners, Li Boru and Xue Wei, moved from China to New York to go to graduate school and wanted to open a restaurant that would evoke the aristocratic cooking of China’s dynastic era.

For ordinary budgets, the kitchen will make most fish dishes with either tilapia or sea bass. The bass, clean and fresh tasting, is what I ordered with the pickled vegetables and in an equally heroic dish called “homemade roasted fish.” The bass was cooked whole and served with crunchy lotus root in a dark, fiery, wonderful stew seasoned with cilantro, Sichuan peppercorns and a 32-ingredient chile oil.

Among the menu’s soft spots were two dishes any Sichuan restaurant should nail. Both dan dan noodles and kung pao chicken were unaccountably sleepy. Still, the noodles themselves, made on site, were very good, and the chicken had real flavor, which isn’t always the case. This wasn’t enough to make either dish interesting, but it does show the care Guan Fu takes with its ingredients.