The Best Food in China - Hot Pot

With 4 weeks in China under my belt, I can easily say it was a difficult experience finding food that I liked.  It turns out that outside of Szechuan province my cuisine search was not in the right place.  Where restaurant food was not to my palette, street food had everything I was looking for and more.  Inside Szechuan province is a whole other story, as their spicy foods are some of the most inspiring dishes I can write about in this blog.  One dish in particular stands out above all others, and is a staple not only in Szechuan province but all over China - Hot Pot.

The best way to describe hot pot is that it is a Chinese fondue.  Custom designed tables have a central burner that a giant pot of broth with one or two varieties is brought to temperature.  Naturally one of these two broths in Szechuan province is spicy and is filled with red peppers and Szechuan peppercorn to give it the authentic taste, among many other spices. From there, hot pot is anything you want it to be.

I went to two hot pot restaurants in China, a low key one in Xi'an and a high end one in Chengdu (Szechuan province) each with their own style.  The hot pot restaurant in Xi'an was setup like a self serve buffet where you grab as many skewers of non-English labeled food as you want.  At the end the waiter counts your stack and gives you a bill.  Between myself and a friend, we had nearly 100 skewers of food and four large beers for around $5 each, including the hot pot fee itself (just a few dollars).   In Chengdu, the hot pot style was more for families, and you order plates of food to be dumped into the pot.  As I was by myself in this instance I could only order 3 plates of food due to their size, and the bill was around $15 for just myself with one beer.

Either way you look at it, hot pot is a feast.  Between skewers of potatoes, various balls of I-Dont-Know-What, crab meat, shrimp, beef, mushrooms, and just about everything else, you will not go hungry.  If your time in China is spent having a hard time finding delicious food, a trip to a hot pot restaurant will be the easiest cure for a hungry belly and a search for something familiar, yet is a perfect Asian dish. 

Making hot pot at home is as simple as buying a bag of hot pot mix at a local Asian grocery store and gathering all the thinly sliced meats and vegetables you can handle.  Our next post will feature the recipes we used to recreate my favorite Chinese dish at home with other recipes for amazing sauces to go along with it!

For our full take on making Chinese Hot Pot at home, check out our recipes and summary of how it all went!