In the interview, Mr. Hiss said that one challenge of their collaboration was getting Mr. Chung to translate his instinctive cooking into recipes. “I’d ask, ‘How much salt?’ And he’d say, ‘Enough!’” Mr. Hiss recalled. “So I bought some graded spoons, spread them out and said to him: ‘Pick one. How much ginger? How much soy sauce? How much chili sauce?’”

People clamored to eat at Hunan, partly because of Mr. Hiss’s praise. Mr. Chung moved from his original spot to a larger space in 1979 and later opened several more restaurants around San Francisco that are known as Henry’s Hunan. His son Howard said in an interview that some less adventurous customers were shocked by the garlic, spice and ginger of his father’s dishes and demanded something tamer.

“If someone said, ‘I want moo goo gai pan,’ he’d say, ‘That’s Cantonese!’” Howard Chung said. “I was a waiter for many years, and people would walk out. They’d ask for dishes we didn’t have. They’d say, ‘That’s not what we had in the Midwest.’”

After the restaurant critic Craig Claiborne of The New York Times ate at Hunan in 1979, he called it the “most talked about restaurant in San Francisco” and said the food was “either gently or violently palate burning.” Mr. Claiborne was fond of fiery foods.

In his cookbook, Mr. Chung rhapsodized about spices, writing that “Hunan people can live without meat, but they cannot live without hot peppers.”

He was born Chung WuShiung on Sept. 9, 1918, to a peasant family in Hunan Province. He was about 2 years old when his father, Chung Wei Yi, a soldier, died, leaving him to be raised by his mother and grandparents. At age 8, he was married in an arranged ceremony to a girl four years his senior. They had three children and later divorced.