A Tale of Two Hotpots

If you want a quick and easy meal, don’t eat hotpot. But if you are willing to work for your meal and are open to unexpected surprises and challenges, might I recommend trying out the hotpot restaurant nearest you.

Hotpot is a special kind of meal that sounds like what it is: a pot of hot liquid, in which you place various vegetables, meats, fungi, and other things. I recently went to a couple hotpot establishments, one in Beijing and one in Chengdu. Although the meals were essentially the same, the two experiences highlight the differences between the two kinds of cuisines.

The restaurant I went to with some Chinese classmates in Beijing was lined with large landscape paintings and dark-stained antique furniture. The feeling, as in many Beijing restaurants, was decidedly ceremonial. After the waiters served us an assortment of vegetables and meats to place in our pots, a man walks in with a ball of dough and asks for our attention. He begins to stretch, pull, and eventually sling dough around while simultaneously doing a little dance. He was clearly having a lot of fun. Still somewhat perplexed as to what this guy was doing, when he came around and gave each of us several long strands of dough, that he had just made some freshly hand-pulled noodles to cook into our pot.

When a few friends—Matt, Riley, and Jill—and I traveled to Sichuan, a province famous for spicy food and, indeed, where hotpot originally comes from, we knew we had to find some hotpot. After roaming the streets of Chengdu, we were delighted when we finally did find a very unassuming hotpot place, and though I was not quite sure what exactly I had ordered, and came to regret the duck intestines later, we were all in all quite happy. I cannot say that it came as a complete surprise that, halfway through the meal, we all began individual permutations of sweating, sniffling, and crying. Whatever they put in the sauce, it had a few extra notches of spicy kick! See our contorted faces below.