DIY delicious

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2016 (3378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s tricky to review a hot-pot restaurant, mostly because the success of your meal is more or less up to you. Or ideally, up to you and your friends, since hot pot, like fondue, is a sociable food experience.

While hot pots pop up occasionally on menus around the city, this Corydon-strip spot, which opened up last winter, is devoted solely to the hot-pot experience. I can’t predict how your meal will turn out, but I can say the process is a fun, fascinating culinary adventure. And with fresh ingredients that draw on a range of Southeast Asian cuisines and helpful staff, Asian Hot Pot is doing its best to make it a tasty one as well.

This is essentially DIY food. First you decide on a soup base, then you pick ingredients to cook up in that soup base, and then you go to a nearby table to craft your own mix of condiments.

Hot-pot setups can vary. At Asian Hot Pot, each person gets a small individual pot that stands on the table. The flame, once turned on by your server, can’t be adjusted, which some hard-core hot potters might find limiting. You also get tongs, a small skimmer and a spoon for wrangling your food.

From this simple start, the possibilities are wide open.

The restaurant offers six basic broths for $2, including a subtle ginger and green onion, a spicy Szechuan that packs a lot of heat and rich chili oil, and a vegetarian option. There are also premium specialty broths ($5), which include silkie bird (a type of chicken), duck and beer, spicy beef tail, pork feet, turtle and deer penis (listed here, as it sometimes is in culinary contexts, under the wonderfully Shakespearean term “pizzle”).

There are more than 70 add-in ingredients, which you can cook and combine as you like. It’s straight-up: if you order egg, for example, you get a whole egg to crack and poach. (Some people also use a raw egg for dipping.) In the vegetable category, chopped bok choy, cilantro and various greens are fresh, and you can also choose from corn, yams, pumpkins, daikon and a range of mushrooms.

There are meats, such as pork, beef and tasty lamb shoulder sliced paper-thin and rolled up, as well as tofu. Fish and seafood options include fish balls, scallops, shrimp, basa and baby cuttlefish. For starches, you can try chewy glass noodles, thin wheat noodles and rice cake sticks.

The condiment bar features chopped peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, green onions and minced garlic in oil, as well as several sauces, including hoisin, Maggi, bean curd, sesame paste and chili.

The lunch special, which is available until 4 p.m., offers five ingredients for $11.95, along with the price of your broth. The supper special is all you can eat for $25.95, plus broth. (It will be more if you want to upgrade to premium ingredients such as northern propeller clams, oysters and abalone.) You can stay for two hours, with hot-pot ingredients and broth added as you need it. If you’re hungry and not in a hurry, then, the supper special could be good value.

To discourage over-ordering, the restaurant does charge for wastage. (This is becoming a common practice at all-you-can-eat and buffet-style places.) And really, don’t feel you have to stockpile a bunch of ingredients. It’s easy to top up your order as you go along, and service is quick and willing.

I made some beginner’s mistakes. Next time, I will probably forgo the fish tofu, which I ordered in the spirit of inquiry but found stolid and rubbery (though shaped, rather charmingly, like little cartoon fishes). What I thought would be a dark and complex condiment mix ended up over-salted. And at one point, I lost track of my cooking times when I became temporarily mesmerized by retro 1980s music videos on the TV screen.

I would score my preliminary outings at maybe three stars, but I could see that hot-pot veterans at nearby tables were clearly turning out four-, maybe even 41/2-star suppers. I could probably do better, then, but the restaurant itself is doing pretty well.

One note: it’s called hot pot for a reason. The pots, which are placed over a butane flame, are scorching to touch and contain boiling liquid, so this is not a place for small children at that age when they grab things on the table.

 

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca