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Beat the cold with hot pot

By Steve Hubrecht (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-11-16 07:58

Beijing is still sunny but undeniably growing colder by the day. Central heating is on and, although it's not snowing yet, winter is not far away.

It's the perfect time of year to head to a hot pot restaurant.

Sure, a bubbling bowl of broth, heated from underneath and slowly cooking up all kinds of tasty treats, is great year-round. But in the heavy, smoggy heat of summer, it's just not as appealing to sit over a big boiling pot with sweat dripping out of every pore.

Hot pot really comes into its own when the wind starts to bite and the temperatures drop. The heating source under the pot, whether it's old-fashioned coals or a more modern electric burner, warms up your torso, the steam rising up from the bowl warms your face and hot food sliding down into your belly warms you from the inside.

Beijing is home to what is surely one of the best selection of hot pot restaurants in all of China, along Guijie.

Some who work in the hot pot restaurants that line the kilometer-long street like to tell diners that the street's name comes from the supposedly haunting glow given off by the thousands of red lanterns hung along it.

Others say that decades ago the street used to be home to a "ghost fair" or "ghost market" where traders bought and sold goods through the night until dawn instead of during the day.

The glowing red lanterns, spooky or not, certainly give the street a great ambiance and, from dusk to late at night, it is almost always bustling with hungry diners.

Small wonder. The food there is cheap and great.

And the roughly 100 or so restaurants on Guijie offer a gamut of hot pot styles. There are classic Beijing-style hot pot places that use a lighter, fragrant broth, Dongbei (Northeastern) hot pot places with hearty fare and sour broth, spicy Sichuan and Chongqing style hot pot places with the signature numbing huajiao or Chinese prickly ash in the broth, gently flavored, seafood-filled Guangdong hot pot places that sometimes put raw eggs in the broth and a host of other regional style hot pot restaurants.

Hot pot is the ultimate communal meal, with everybody sitting around the pot, dropping food in the simmering broth and chatting, pulling bits of food out when they're cooked, chatting some more, dipping the food into one of the numerous tasty sauces, eating it, dropping more food in and then chatting some more. It's hard to imagine hot pot without the socializing - in many ways it is the exact opposite of fast food.

But although everybody's literally eating from the same pot, hot pot is great for accommodating different tastes.

Just about any kind of meat or vegetable is good for putting in the broth, as are tofu and eggs.

The broth can be as spicy or as mild as you want and the overwhelming array of dipping sauces available at most hot pot restaurants means that every diner can get exactly want he or she wants.

And if two people in your group want completely different foods or broths, no problem, just get one of those nifty hot pots divided in a yin yang shape.

Nobody knows for certain but many Beijingers will tell you that hot pot originated in the northern parts of China, where it was a great way to ward off the winter chill, at least about 1,400 years ago.

From there, they say, it gradually spread south across the country, with each region adding its own local ingredients and eventually developing its own distinct style.

The results today are nothing short of delicious and, while the recipes and ingredients may have changed, a hot pot meal still serves its original purpose of keeping the cold at bay.