The Hot Pot Restaurant

(From the left: Catherine, Sara, Javan, Sarah)

On Saturday, we stopped by a new 24 hour hot pot restaurant for lunch.  Typical of Chinese construction time lines, the space was completely empty and undone when we arrived a little over 2 weeks ago.  Yet, it was completely finished and opened about 9 days later.  We watched and commented on the progress each day as we walked past it on our way to the subway.

Jieru loves hot pot.  Today was a perfect example why it is so great to be here with someone from China.  The menu, and most menus are all in Chinese.  At other places we've managed to order on our own by pointing to the large beautiful pictures of the food.  We point and then indicate how many of those dishes we want with the fingers on our hand.  But at this place, there were no pictures.  Lucky for us, Jieru took the dry erase marker in hand and started checking off exactly what we would eat.  Like I said before, she is literally our mother in many respects on this trip.

Hot pot is a large pot filled with broth that boils on a hot plate at your table.  After picking what kind of broth you want, this one is mushroom and chicken, you order different things to put in it to cook, much like fondu places.

Now, I am not a huge meat person, but it this lamb not beautiful?  Jieru ordered lamb, beef, sweet potato slices, lotus root, (which was new to me and so yummy), something that I swear was SPAM, that none of us liked much, and two different kinds of tofu.  I never knew that tofu came in so many different forms.  I really love this one type of tofu that is like a wide textured ribbon.  It is nothing at all like the cubed tofu at home.  They eat that kind as well, but the other types are so much better. When we leave I will miss the ribbon tofu.  Jieru said that even at the Asian Market you can only get it frozen and it is not as good.

Once your food is cooked, you fish it out with your chopsticks and dip it into another sauce.  Ours was a sesame sauce that you mixed cilantro and minced green onions into.  We also had a minced garlic sauce.  They were both so rich and fresh.  I ate so much that I needed to lean back in the booth to relieve some of the pressure on my belly! 

We were all pretty pleased with the hot pot experience.  You may notice that we are all wearing aprons.  They actually hand these out when you sit down.  I guess you are more likely to drop something on your clothes with the hot pot meal.  I wouldn't mind bringing that tradition home to my house.  Those that know me understand that too many times I napkin is just not enough for this messy eater.  Catherine actually won the award in that case. She told us that she managed to still get some sauce on her pants even with the apron.  Maybe we could start a messy eater support group!