New York is getting crowded with hot pots. The city is not yet in the same league as, say, Chongqing, where the dish is said to have originated and where an association dedicated to keeping track of such things says there are about 50,000 places to eat it. New York, by my count, has a mere two or three dozen, most of them in the sections of Brooklyn, Queens and Lower Manhattan that have considerable Chinese populations. But new hot pot restaurants seem to arrive every few weeks, with some independent operators among a growing number of chains from China.
Downtown Flushing, Queens, has Little Sheep Hot Pot, founded in Inner Mongolia and one of the first hot pot purveyors in New York to move beyond the all-you-can-eat model, which led to widespread improvement in ingredient quality; Mister Hotpot, known among the city’s pig worshipers for its creamy, ivory-toned pork-bone broth; and Liuyishou Hot Pot, a Chongqing-based concern where the spiced beef tallow that is an essential component of Sichuan hot pot is molded into the shape of a smiling, bow-tied cow.
Farther south in Flushing is Niu Pot, the city’s best hot pot establishment by several measures, including the number and complexity of its broths. Niu Pot cooks a very good winter-melon soup and serves it inside the melon’s hollow shell, although it is most widely known for serving marbled slices of raw beef wrapped tightly around a Barbie doll, like a dress for Lady Gaga.
In Manhattan, hot pot outposts have been planted along the Bowery in a line advancing toward Chinatown, starting with Zhen Wei Fang. If there had been a hot pot restaurant in “Blade Runner,” it would have looked like Zhen Wei Fang, an import from Miami that has private booths, simultaneous videos projected side by side on the walls and a robot host by the entrance. (Adding to the sense of a future gone awry, the robot wasn’t working the last time I went.) A few blocks south is Tang Hotpot, probably the most luxe hot pot in the city. The menu is illustrated with still-life ingredient photographs that look as if Vermeer painted them, and the pictures aren’t that far off from reality.
Almost all of these emporiums offer Sichuan hot pot, a broth covered in a deep slice of chile oil in which dried red chiles, Sichuan peppercorns and various other spices churn around like the remains of toy sailboats after a hurricane. But Da Long Yi Hot Pot, which opened in May in a second-story space above Canal Street, has the advantage over most of its competitors of having originated in Sichuan. Its home base, from which more than 200 Da Long Yis have issued, is the provincial capital of Chengdu. Chongqing was administratively sheared from the rest of the province in 1997.
Although you key your name into a touch pad at the top of the stairs to get on Da Long Yi’s waiting list, and you learn that your table is ready from an automated text, you order by penciling an X on the paper menu, in a box next to the item you want. The menu also suggests the length of time each item should be held down in the boiling soup.
It goes without saying that you will want a Sichuan hot pot at Da Long Yi. You will be asked whether you want it mild, medium or spicy, although in my experience there isn’t much difference. A more important question is whether you will cook your meal in Sichuan broth alone; in a split pot with Sichuan broth on one side and either tomato or mushroom broth, neither of them spicy, on the other; or in a three-chambered pot with some of each. The narrow range of choices can be an advantage for a novice hot potter, who might be swamped by the maximalist menus at Tang or Niu Pot.
The split pots make Da Long Yi a good place to take somebody with a low tolerance for heat, although as a practical matter it is impossible to eat a Sichuan hot pot meal without ingesting at least a spoonful or two of chile oil. Old hands know that the oil tends to pool away from the region of the broth that is bubbling most furiously, and ingredients that, after cooking, are removed from the pot in this area will emerge relatively clean.
Whether this is desirable varies from eater to eater and from ingredient to ingredient. Deeply furrowed, folded or layered foods — the Kungfu beef tripe spread out on a mound of chipped ice; the tofu skins; the fried dough sticks known as youtiao or, on Da Long Yi’s menu, “fried bun” — retain spicy oil in quantities that may become challenging. Extremely smooth items, like the hard-cooked quail eggs, the rabbit kidneys speared on a toothpick, or the long and surprisingly slippery tubes of duck intestine, on the other hand, can survive a trip through the deepest patch of chile oil without any appreciable damage.
You can, if you like, follow the custom of Chengdu or Chongqing by focusing on ingredients that are prized more for feel than flavor. The duck intestines, for instance, which quickly contract in the hot broth and come out about 30 seconds later with the texture of barely cooked squid. Or the pale ivory sheets of flattened artery, which after cooking about twice as long have a long-lasting chew that reminds me of geoduck.
On the other hand, more flavorful ingredients, once they’ve cooked for a few minutes, can help punch up the broths, which aren’t quite as deep or complex as they are at some other hot pot providers. This does not apply to the lengths of corn on the cob, which don’t taste like anything to begin with. And I would avoid the “vegetable platter,” which was more like a lettuce platter. But it is useful to keep in mind that if you toss sliced king oyster mushrooms, or crown daisy greens, or bands of kelp tied into knots, or even the Hershey’s Kiss-shaped fish balls with gooey orange roe inside, into the soup and forget about them for a while, both the ingredients and the soup will rise to the occasion.
Some ingredients, though, you hold in your chopsticks, watching for 30 seconds or a minute until you can see they’re ready. The marble tiles of Wagyu rib are in this category, and the New Zealand lamb shaved as thin as prosciutto, and the Kurobuta pork belly from Japan. The whole prawns on wooden skewers will be tender and running with juices in just over a minute. The sweet, small flounder fillets might need twice that.
Even if you are careful to pull these bites out in the bubbling center of the pot, away from the oil, the chiles and Sichuan peppercorns will catch up with you sooner or later. They build up on your tongue, they slowly infiltrate your dipping sauce, and the mala tingle will take over. There is no fighting it at that point, of course, though a bowl of white rice is a good investment in the future.
And when conversation at the table has stopped completely, when the water you keep pouring into sadistically small cups won’t help any more, there is one thing that will: fresh watermelon juice, sold by the carafe.
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