Hot Pot Restaurants

December 23, 2008

While TJ was here we went to a Hot Pot restaurant. This is a place where you get a pot of soup for the table, the pot is placed in the center of the table on a gas or electric burner and heated till boiling.
You want to get it boiling as you just don't know where the water came from. You know, to kill all the micro- organisms. But it's not just soup it your own creation! After you choose your soup/broth you then select from another menu which are items you want to cook in the broth. Meat, shrimp, broccoli, cabbage, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, mushroom dumplings, pork dumplings, fish balls just to name a few items you would recognize and even eat.

We selected the dual mushroom broth hot pot. The center bowl was the SPICY broth and the outer ring was the plain broth. Both just bursting with mushrooms! Yum! We even ordered a few spring rolls, why not everything's good fried.

That's Jason our driver (Mr. Gu) and Melody our guide, she was with us most of the week taking us around Shanghai if you recall. After you are finished cooking and eating all the items you ordered and cooked in the broth, you then drink the broth which has become super tastey!

Some other items on the menu that we are told taste delightful in the soup and are very very popular - pigs brain, pigs lung, duck tongue, beef penis....yup there it is, I wrote it and now you know too! Organ meat is very popular at these hot pot places. And no I will not be trying it, I am adventurous but even I draw the line at that!