Hot Pot City is not a city. It’s a Hot Pot shop in a city. But Chinese uses the word “city” to imply they have a lot of it.
Hot Pot is not a pot, nor is it hot. A more appropriate translation would be “Fire wok”.
Hot Pot, or Fire Wok, is a very unique way of cooking/eating Chinese food. Unlike any other Chinese food, this is the one thing that you perform both actions simultaneously.
When you arrive at a fire wok shop, you will be seated at a bar, where every customer has their own hot pot. It is merely a pot that’s sort of buried in the table, and you can request whatever kind of soup base you like for it. Once the soup started boiling, you can go get any kind of food they provide, and bring it back to your pot to cook it. Different kind of food cooks differently, so you will need to calculate for the most efficient way to cook your food. For example, chicken needs to be cooked all the way in, beef doesn’t, so you can start cooking chicken from the very beginning, and eat beef mean while. Also, lamp cooks very fast, a thin slice of lamb can be cooked within 5 seconds, and if you left it in the pot for too long, the meat become very chew and thus lose the nice tender texture.
One of the most important things about Fire Wok is the dipping sauce. One of my favorite sauces, and the most common one, is the Satay Sauce, or sometime called as Taiwanese BBQ Sauce (and we Taiwanese don’t use it for BBQ). You should fill up a small bowl with this sauce, and add some green onion. Another ingredient for this is to add egg yolk to the sauce. You should separate the egg yolk from egg white, and dump egg white directly into the boiling soup, this will add good flavor to it. After you add egg yolk to sauce, you should stir it up evenly so no yellow can be seen.
The true art of fire wok is to constantly add food into the pot, and constantly taking food out of the pot to eat. The correct workflow is: Dip X into bowl -> take Y out of bowl, dip Y into sauce -> eat Y -> dip Z into bowl -> take X out of bowl -> dip X into sauce: alternate X, Y, and Z. The trick is to decide what X and Y and Z should be, because some may cook faster than others, so careful planning is recommended.
Very educational! Here in America, we sometimes say “city” for things that are not really a city too. For example, there is a store called “Appliance City” by where I live. Sometimes when I go past it I think, “Oh no! I thought I was in Portland” but then I remember that Appliance City is just a name. I just get confused sometimes because I’m still a little new to the area.
Another example is “Circuit City”. I go there to pretend I am not in Salem.
I’m surprised/saddened/hungry that there aren’t more hot pot/fire wok places in Portland. I’m sure it would be very popular if more people knew about it, and it was more accessible, in the sense that sushi is. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for a young entrepreneur?
let’s do it. i wonder how much initial investing we need to put down.
We got a Hot Pot City here in California as well.
I’m going there in 2 days actually, for my birthday.
Nice! I believe the one in Oregon is owned by the same people in California. The owner told me they have to drive a lot of the food up here from bay area.
I wish there are more hot pot places in US, Taiwan is flooded with them.