Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Hot Pot

So this week I had one of my very first food adventures in Hong Kong; I tried hot pot. To give you a basic image of what hot pot is, refer to one of its informal names: Chinese fondue. What hot pot consists of is a large metal bowl at the center of your table, which is sitting on a small burner and filled with boiling broth. You are given plates of raw food and you cook the food in the boiling broth, dip it in soy sauce and eat it all using your finely honed chopstick skills.

 

Sounds pretty simple and not too adventurous, right? And normally it isn't, but delightfully, our meal turned into "see what funny things the Americans are willing to try" hot pot. My coworkers and I were invited out to dinner by Sam and Amanda, the fantastic Hong Kongese couple from whom we are renting office space. They really are our life-lines here in Hong Kong, but they also love to amuse themselves by prodding at the cultural differences between the Hong Kongese and their American acquaintances. So when we all sat down to dinner at the hot pot restaurant the other night, I had a suspicion that we were going to be trying all manner of strange and sometimes stomach-turning foods. I was right.



Besides the familiar sliced beef, lamb and chicken, dumplings and fish, we also had ostrich, tofu skin, Vietnamese sausage, fried fish skin, pig intestine, squid paste, fish balls, tripe, and, of course, century egg. Sam and Amanda and their two sons, who also joined us for dinner, absolutely delighted in plopping a bit of freshly cooked fish ball or pig intestine into our bowls, coaxing us to eat it, laughing at our guesses as to what it was and only after we had started gnawing on a particularly chewy piece of tripe, tell us what we were eating. I tried very hard to eat a good bit of everything and I am proud that I didn't spit anything out upon learning that it was an egg which had been preserved in clay for the last several months, or something else strange.

In summation, after reviewing and digesting my first experience with hot pot, I didn't hate it. In fact, some aspects I quite enjoyed. Just like fondue, I love the idea of cooking fresh food at the table just before eating it. Although, unlike fondue, I particularly like that you cook the food in broth rather than oil so it is much healthier. Also, I discovered several new foods I like: ostrich (no, it does not taste like chicken), braised lettuce dipped in soy sauce and fried fish skin (then again, what isn't good deep fried?). Will I ever eat hot pot again? Possibly. Will I take myself there? Maybe. Will I go again if someone invites me? Most likely, but only if I get a say as to what gets ordered, and then, I'll pass on the pork intestine.