| rev:text
| - Newbie to Hot Pot (so much that I had to look it up on youtube!), but saw the fun reviews from fellow yelpers and thought "I need to try this!" I admit I was scared about the "cooking my own RAW chicken meat" (from one plate, touching everything under it, to the reusable soup, one set of chopsticks that touch raw, soup, and cooked) without any friend there to "hold my hand" - I mean I was FREAKED. But everything went well and I had alot of fun.
So for those of you new like me and without a guide:
1) You sit down and pick soup base + meat choice. ASK to sample the broth before choosing.
2) Your soup base is just for cooking - you're NOT going to pour it back over noodles.
3) As your base warms to boil, go to the condiment buffet and pick up stuff you would like. I had done some youtubing beforehand, so I used a couple of sauce recommendations from there, but really my favorite was the (only) one the restaurant provided (on the glass of the buffet server). Another one I liked is a "traditional" sauce from some province in China: 1 ladle sesame paste + 1 spoon chive paste.
4) While your base is still warming up, or if you took forever to get your "extras" like me, I added scallions, chili oil, cilantro, and garlic. I wanted to "spruce up" the mushroom base soup. It smelled fine, but I do like a "little" heat (like a level 1 on 5). The yelpers scared me on the heat levels from the "Kimchi" and "Szechuan." Someone mentioned asking for a level one, but this was not an option during my visit. My extras on the "mushroom" broth ended up perfect for me. In fact, as a salt loving American, once the broth condensed a little, it was a knock out!
5) Next, add hard veggies. Now there are NO signs to tell you how long to cook anything. I think I let the broccoli cook for 4-5 min - a tad too mushy. The corn was 20 min - ok. The fish and shrimp balls, fried tofu, soft tofu were 1-2 min - they were fine for me and surprisingly tasted better than the chicken. "Fish ball" sounds "fishy" to me, but they were flavorful and a nice chew (kinda like a softer matzo ball). I never used the soft veggies (leaves).
6) Then, the meat. The server mentioned 30 secs - 1 min for the raw chicken slice. It does change color enough to notice if it's still raw, but I made sure to kill it a little extra. Chopsticks: to kill the chicken bacteria, redip the chopsticks in the boiling soup. In fact, I LEFT them in the boiling soup for the 1 min that my chicken was cooking. The fake crab and some weird white shaved "fish" (?) slices took about 20 sec to cook. I was NOT coordinated enough to time all this perfectly the first time out, so I just cooked one or two things at once then ate as they were coming out (Redip those chopsticks FREQUENTLY).
7) Once I got all my goodies cooked and eaten. I went for the ramen noodles (2 min), adding fresh chili oil, scallions, garlic, and cilantro for the cooking and post-cooking. By this point the corn was ready, and I added it to the noodles. Great noodles! 4/5
Cons:
Contrary to other reviews, on my visit, there were no eggs and no fresh fruit.
I wish they had an extra list of how to make sauces - since we did go to cook our food, I like having recipes!
I would also like something to tell me how long to cook the items. Again the recipe thing.
Lunch price has increased (from yelp reviews) - $12/person + $1.50 for a can of coke.
Overall:
Fun and tasty. But it's only as good as YOUR cooking that day. 3.5/5
Ps. for those of you like me, I did NOT get food poisoning!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)