hot pot Beijing-style....

Ooooooh I am looking forward to the weather getting cold so BGD and I (and any other friends we might have made by then...) can hole up around a hot pot for hours on end! It's a really fun way of eating, so Dave, Benny and I took Mary to Guijie, near where I lived in 2007, where part of the street is bedecked with hundreds of fabulous lanterns, behind which lie a whole host of delicious hot pot venues:

Once there, we copied the locals and kitted ourselves out with some aprons:

Beijing hot pot (火锅), as I know it, involves ordering a big bowl of soup, which is heated from a gas canister in the table. Your soup pot can be divided into several sections so that you can order different types and spiciness-levels of soup. Our spicy soup looked particularly furnace-like, a dark red liquid bubbling much more furiously than the others, and a selection of angry looking chillies puffed up and floating on the surface... eek!

We ordered a selection of raw ingredients: thinly sliced meat, various seafood items and plates of sliced vegetables, eggs, noodles, and so on. And some beer, obv! At the place we went to you could get entire small frogs and a variety of intestines, so be sure to know what you're ordering or you may be in for a nasty surprise...

The next step is to pop the noodles and vegetables into the soup to cook, and to swirl pieces of meat in the soup with your chopsticks (or risk one of your hot-pot-soon-to-be-ex-buddies stealing your prime beef...), dip it in garlic or sesame sauce - et voila! Dinner is served. A very sociable way of eating, that can go on for hours. The heat generated by the furnace makes hotpot a winter winner, but a rather sweaty summer soiree.....

An alternative venue for the more faint-hearted is the Hot Loft, a sister place to the Noodle Loft (see previous post), where I went with my parents in 2007 and had a tasty, cleaner and slightly pricier version of the same....