Hot pot dining is heating up in Bay Area.
Hot pot restaurants multiply across the Bay Area.
Into the bubbling broth at Boiling Szechuan Hotpot go the sliced oyster mushrooms and the cuttlefish balls, glossy and black. In slide fat blue-gray tiger shrimp, too — a couple into the milky chicken stock on the left side of the pot, another two into the spicy broth on the right, which is capped with crimson oil, dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. Close to a dozen plates of greens, thinly sliced meats and raw seafood orbit the soup pot. Bowls of sauces and beers fill in the interstices. Let the gorging begin.
The appeal of sitting around a table, swishing ingredients through hot broth to cook them, seems near-inexhaustible at present. Restaurants with names like Fiery Hot Pot Buffet, My Pot, the Pot’s, Tasty Pot, and Lollipot ring the Bay Area, most of them less than 3 years old. Boiling Szechuan Hotpot, for the record, has been open only two months. It is located on El Camino Real in Millbrae, a mere half-block from its nearest competitor.
The Bay Area’s hot pot boom echoes much larger ones in China, Taiwan and Southern California. As the population of hot pot restaurants escalates, so, too, do their gimmicks.
Japanese shabu-shabu, a cook-your-own meal involving dashi and thin slices of beef, first saw a limited popularity in the 1980s. In the 1990s Taiwanese hot pot specialists like Happy Valley and Coriya Hot Pot City introduced tables with inset burners and make-yourown sauce buffets. A smattering of Japanese, northern Chinese and Sichuan restaurants have long offered hot pot meals.
Traditional northern Chinese hot pots (huo guo) can be still found at Boiling BeiJing, a 2year-old restaurant in San Bruno whose long menu of Beijing specialties is all but ignored in the wintertime. In the rainier months, most tables gather around what looks like a bundt pan with an oversize central chimney. Before portable propane burners came along, the chimney would be filled with burning coals to keep the ring of broth at a simmer.
At the start of the meal, the beef broth here is clear and characterless (unless you order the spicy version capped with chile oil). Diners pay $3.50 per person for the soup and order the ingredients by the piece. Curls of half-frozen lamb are a must; they cook with just a few swipes through the broth, their stripes of fat melting almost instantly. So are cubes of frozen tofu, which become saturated with broth as they heat, and leaves of napa cabbage, watercress, and tong ho (aromatic chrysanthemum greens). The more people around the table, the more room you have to order items like book tripe, cloud fungus, seaweed knots and yam noodles.
The broth concentrates as it simmers, picking up the flavors of everything immersed in it. But the real complement to the meal is Boiling BeiJing’s rich sauce made with sesame paste, leek-flower paste, fermented tofu and other ingredients that the waiters refuse to divulge.
The current hot pot boom arrived with the recession, spread by restaurateurs attempting to siphon the lines away from each new successful restaurant. The first wave, in 2010, was half-Japanese, led by Shabu House and its many imitators, many of them owned by Chinese and Taiwanese Americans. Around the same time, Yum Brands, the corporation that owns Pizza Hut and KFC, purchased Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, China’s largest hot pot chain, for $586 million. Franchises quickly appeared around the Bay Area (there are six).
Newer competitors look to China and Taiwan, where hot pot restaurants have seen an unparalleled surge in popularity. Clarissa Wei, a Southern Californian food writer who has traveled extensively in both countries, says that there, “the elaborateness has been taken to another level.”
Wei has eaten at an opulent Shanghai restaurant where she was served a giant rose formed of raw pork petals and a log with edible mushrooms growing out of it. She has swished beef through broth bubbling in crystal bowls and dined at a Taiwanese restaurant where the cooks practice whole-animal butchery, slicing meat to order.
Hot pot has reached its rococo era.
For restaurateurs, the draw of opening a hot pot restaurant is manifold: Since the majority of the ingredients come to the table raw or even frozen, the format cuts down on labor and food waste. The restaurant can accomodate budget-minded diners and splurges, depending on what customers order. Din-
ner, for most, is the night’s entertainment. (Some all-you-caneat hot pot restaurants set a timer down on the table with the broth, limiting the meal to two hours.)
In California, just as in China, the jostle for attention has pushed the hot pot into new forms. Not surprisingly, Southern California has turned the hot pot into fast food. A San Gabriel Valley chain named Boiling Point introduced individual hot pots heaped high with ingredients in 2004. It already has several locations across the South Bay and the Peninsula.
Homegrown copycats are multiplying just as quickly. The most prolific is Tasty Pot, which recently opened branches in downtown Berkeley and San Francisco’s Richmond District. Whether you order hot beef, Thai seafood or curry broth, Tasty Pot’s dishes share a characteristic excess. Each plunge of the chopsticks into the mass of food and bubbling liquid threatens to tip a chunk of meat into your lap and unearths some new discovery you don’t remember reading about on the menu. There may be fish balls molded around shrimp roe, beef tendon, napa cabbage, steamed pork, glass noodles, a fat New Zealand mussel or the cross section of a corn cob. Meats overcook quickly, vegetables melt into mush. It is not surprising that the average age of diners is under 30.
Many of the new Bay Area restaurants, like Boiling Szechuan Hotpot, have responded to competition by going upscale with wood-paneled dining rooms, induction burners built into the tables, and luxury ingredients like Wagyu beef and sea scallops. Others offer a dozen or more flavors of broth. Nabe’s two San Francisco locations, for example, offer “sets” such as duck breast, leeks and ramen to cook in dashi broth or kimchi with Kurobuta pork belly to dunk into spicy kimchi broth.
Some hot pot restaurants have amped up the theatrics to Michael Bay levels.
Much like a spin through satellite television channels, iPot can paralyze the first-time diner. The stiff, laminated menus at this 15-month-old, all-you-can-eat restaurant in the Inner Sunset are striped with columns of options and presented to the table with a dryerase pen for ticking off items.
The choices are infinite and, depending on your party, contentious. Should you share a pot of broth, or does each person want his or her own? Should you cook your meal in a castiron cooking vessel that is half soup pot, half griddle? (The meal costs $27.95 a person, no matter what you decide.) Which of the 15 soup bases should you start with? How about the 27 kinds of meat or fish, 30 varieties of meatballs, two dozen vegetables, and eight kinds of tofu to cook in it? With its tufted booths and sleek white induction-burner tables, the restaurant makes most Las Vegas buffets look spartan. Diners find themselves crossing the room to visit the mix-your-own-sauce bar and the fresh fruit spread. It is, one has to admit, a ripping good time.
The common thread that links dinners at the traditional Boiling Beijing and the novelty-embracing iPot: Hot pot always ends in bloated surrender. Faces shiny and flushed after several hours in the meaty steambath. Bowls of half-devoured sauce ringed with drips. Limp rice noodles splayed across the plate in exhaustion. And always, a couple of transparent slices of red meat remaining on the plate to mock your stamina.