the 7 day hot pot challenge (an allegory on hedonism in the 21st century disguised as your handy guide to beijing hot pot)
One of my key precepts is that repetition breeds meaning. If you write a poem you’re just a person, even if it’s a really good poem; you’re not a poet until you write a bunch of poems. An experiment isn’t valid (or at least I don’t think so and you shouldn’t either) until it’s been replicated successfully. And if you only eat hot pot once… well, then you’re just going to be hungry the rest of your life, aren’t you?
Now, at the end of this week, I consider myself a true guru of hot pot in Beijing. I have sat down every day this week — opposite another person, I might add, which is no easy task considering I needed to find someone who could be convinced to get hot pot with me for seven days straight — and I feel confident that I as a person, or at least my waistline, have grown. Below are the fruits of my research presented, as one of those Greek historians once said, as a monument for all time.
Day 1 (Sunday):
Where I ate: “Chongqing something or other”
Who I ate with: A mean person and her friend who was nice.
Impressions: This place was on Guijie, which if you don’t know is a big street with a lot of restaurants. There’s a lot of streets like that in Beijing, filled to varying degrees with white people — this one usually seems to lie on the lower end the white people spectrum, which I appreciate. Most of the restaurants are crayfish-centered, but I’ve never eaten at one of those because I’m a contrarian who only ever acts opposite his own interests.
This was one of those places where the waitstaff really dress up in fancy old-fashioned clothes, and there was a bit of a hullabaloo when we got inside: apparently there was a show downstairs of some sort that was slated to go on. My friends didn’t want to see it, which is fine because I dislike loud places and just wanted to eat hot pot, but when we went upstairs they were saying it was /too/ empty, so then they were thinking of going downstairs, and it seemed like the waiter was all in on us going downstairs for whatever reason, but since I don’t speak Chinese nobody asked my opinion anyway, so I went to get sauces, which was just what I wanted in the first place.
This location was also where I first discovered (to my dismay) that the beer they serve with hot pot is only ~3.3% ABV and also (to my delight but then my dismay) that they will give you a bottle of 45% ABV clear cow-themed spirit for less then two dollars which tasted exactly like it smelled, i.e. like paint thinner.
Overall: 3.7/5 for food, 2/5 for tables that were so huge I had to shout for someone to hear me from across it, 5/5 for enthusiasm from the waitstaff about the upcoming show (which I never saw and may have been cancelled for lack of attendance).
Day 2 (Monday):
Where I ate: Xiangyuzhai shuanrou
Who I ate with: A thoughtful young woman who I never saw again.
Impressions: There are a few kinds of hot pot. Chongqing hot pot is undoubtedly the best among them: it’s very spicy which is always good, you put it in your mouth and then it tastes delicious, and it’s a deep, blood-red color, signifying its virility and status as a vital fluid which, like my own blood, is the only thing keeping me alive and attached to this mortal coil — another beautiful example of how in the natural world form follows function.
This was not Chongqing hot pot. This was Beijing hot pot. Let me say at the outset that Beijing food is pretty bad, which seems to be the general consensus of most people I talk to except for, unsurprisingly, Beijing natives. In this grand tradition Beijing hot pot is, as far as I can tell, literally just ramped-up water you boil things in with a few nuts or whatever thrown in for the aesthetics. Now that being said this place was way better than I would have expected. Food was as nice as it could be, tons of people laughing and drinking, and the floor was wet, which I guess doesn’t really matter but I thought I’d point it out. I ate a lot of hot pot. There was some nice calligraphy on the walls. My dining companion burned her finger. These things come and go. Afterwards, the moon looked nice.
Overall: 5/5 for Beijing hot pot, 1/5 for hot pot, 4/5 for being hot temperature-wise— don’t touch it!
Day 3 (Tuesday):
Where I ate: Big Tiger hot pot
Who I ate with: An open-minded individual who is willing to accept that rice with hot pot is not only fine, but even good and tasty.
Impressions: In the West I’d turn my nose up at chains, but by and large my experience in China has been that a lot of chain restaurants are chain restaurants because they actually are pretty good and got so successful they were able to open up another store. … Maybe that describes all chains, but I have a hard time believing that McDonald's was ever good. Anyway, apparently this place is a restaurant that actually originated in Sichuan, and then they opened one in Beijing, because why not. I was ready to go whole hog on this, but my dining partner wimped out and only ordered medium spicy, which I found to be disappointing. Besides that the food was just really okay, not amazing — the best part was the breath mints they had at the door, which could make your breath smell like green apple, spearmint or I think strawberry. It’s this kind of forward thinking in mint-makers that we need; not everyone wants to kiss a spearmint mouth and it’s time for the monopoly to end!!!
On the television they were showing one of those reality shows where they get a bunch of celebrities together and then make them do stupid tasks so that normal people can laugh at celebrities and feel good about themselves. I really hate these kinds of shows and like all intellectuals who think they’re better than other people I find them to be insipid and inane, but I do remember that there was this one challenge where you had to eat a big bowl of noodles from a tupperware container basically in a wind tunnel. I think you gained points from how fast you could get them all in your mouth and how many noodles you kept from flying away, but this one guy took his chopsticks and twined all the noodles around them like you would do eating spaghetti and then just shoved the whole noodle ball into his mouth, and honestly I was impressed with his tactics so he gained my respect. Doesn’t make the show good, though.
Overall: 2.7/5 for food, ???/5 for how spicy it could have actually been, 5/5 good head on the shoulders of the guy eating the noodles
Day 4 (Wednesday):
Where I ate: Dragon Boat Wharf
Who I ate with: A young man who works with airplanes.
Impressions: Wow, this place was fancy. They had a koi pond inside. They had a water wheel that wheeled water into and out of the koi pond. They had these little tiny figures of men sitting on the rocks in the koi poind and little pagodas on the rocks in the koi pond, which I guess suggests that the koi are actually giant monster fish and these poor men are trapped on the rocks, unable to escape (or maybe that’s overthinking it). It was labyrinthine. I had trouble finding the sauces. The water was daffodil water, or perhaps daisy water. My dining companion was a full 40 minutes late, which led to an awkward stare-off with the waittress, and then since he was late we had to wait another 15 minutes. The food here is pretty good — we got the tomato broth and the spicy broth, and the tomato broth was a lot of fun. It tasted like tomato soup, but a good tomato soup, and I was literally just drinking the soup at the end of the meal.
This place was where I started to get some real pushback for ordering rice with my hot pot, which is a practice that apparently goes against all the laws of man, God and nature, which would have made Mao Zedong himself cry if he were still alive to hear about it, and which will certainly get me sent to the deepest level of hell when I die. For a second I thought my dining partner was going to flat-out refuse to order me rice — “you shouldn’t eat rice with hot pot,” he said, after which I explained that I’m a rational adult and can make my own decisions, “well Chinese people don’t do it,” yes but I am not actually Chinese even if you’re pretty sure I should have been born in Chongqing and also I like to think of myself as someone who subverts gastronomical norms in general “but we already got noodles” well yes but I don’t want noodles I want rice which is what I’m saying “but noodles are basically the same as rice” well then if you got noodles and it’s the same as rice I don’t see what the problem is with getting me my damn rice???
Anyway, eventually I got the rice. The melons here were also good.
Overall: 4/5 for fancy decoration, 5/5 for spelunking potential, 7/5 for rice
Day 5 (Thursday):
Where I ate: A place that “this one is spicy, I promise”
Who I ate with: Someone who, surprisingly, loves hot pot as much as I do (I hold this person in high regard).
Impressions: This place was also in Guijie and I consider it pretty solid. We went here on the promise, made by my dining partner, that this place would be truly spicy, supposedly on a level I hadn’t yet experienced. Well, it wasn’t really. It was regular Beijing spicy. In all other respects this place is a good choice, though. The tomato broth was good, the spicy was adequate, and they had a sauce bar, which prior to coming back to China was something I just kind of assumed every hot pot place had but this is not the case. In some restaurants you have to order sauces a la carte, which can be difficult A. if you don’t know what to ask for in Chinese (me) B. If you’re a monster who subscribes to the “more kinds of stuff must be better” rule (also me). The result is that sauce bars are a different kind of thing one learns to appreciate when selecting a potential hot pot restaurant. This had a good sauce bar with ~free~ little cans of oil.
The service was… very attentive. I’d say these people were more on point even than Haidilao, which is honestly saying something. The servers were waiting to pounce on any plate they could take away as soon as the food was gone, and they were constantly bringing new dishes to replace the… the dish where you put the… stuff that comes out of the pot before it goes into your sauce. If you haven’t eaten hot pot you’re not going to get this.
My dining partner was a little fed up with all the attention, but I tried my best to indulge the people and stand up for their performance, having worked in a restaurant myself. “They’re just trying to do their job the best they can,” I said, soothingly. Internally I thought “People haven’t been this nice to me since I left Japan.”
Overall: 3/5 for spicy, 5/5 for sauce bar, actually legitimately 4/5 overall, also 5/5 for service (or 2/5 if you don’t appreciate service)
Day 6 (Friday):
Where I ate: You’d better believe it’s fucking Haidilao.
Who I ate with: The sweetest, kindest person who tends to be too anxious about everything.
Impressions: I really can’t hype Haidilao enough. I really don’t even know what to say. Haidilao is kind of like the place where, if you died and went to heaven and thought “Well now that I’ve made it to heaven and can have all my fantasies fulfilled I think I’ll first indulge in some hot pot” then the heaven hot pot place would be Haidilao, except in addition to the hot pot it was also perfect in every other way, like you could have really good sex there or lots of drugs with no ill effects. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Haidilao is in many ways a reflection of this perfect Platonic form of the hot pot restaurant. What else can I say besides “there’s a guy who comes out and does acrobatic tricks with the noodles and he kept almost hitting me in the face with the noodles but he snapped them back at the last moment”.
I’m not trying to say Haidilao is perfect, because it’s not. It’s a chain hot pot place, one of the biggest I believe (though as I said before many of these are chains and in China being a chain restaurant imo isn’t a bad thing, although sure I probably have low standards), and it doesn’t necessarily have the best food or soups on offer as opposed to other hot pot restaurants wait I just remembered that the beer at Haidilao is 5.5% ABV while all the other hot pot places have 3.5% ABV I take it all back Haidilao is perfect and superior in every way.
Other things from Haidilao:
- There are always many, many people there. There may be a long wait. To help with this Haidilao has a gigantic waiting room with electric massage chairs, free snacks, and a variety of fun diversions (including playing cards and Go).
- There’s a guy in a mask who goes around putting on shows. In the show he has a bunch of different masks and he switches the masks out in time with a song that’s playing. I shazamed the song and it’s “The Mask Song”, so I don’t know what I expected.
- There is a Haidilao that just opened that is staffed by robots. This seems interesting, but the point of Haidilao is that the staff and service are amazing, so I don’t really know what the point is with the robots.
- I slept in a Haidilao. This is not an exaggeration and is exactly what it sounds like. The manager gave me pillows, I laid down in the booth and I slept there until 7 AM and left. It’s Haidilao.
Overall: 5/5 of the hot towels they offered me which I took every single one, Haidilao/5, Haidilao is good.
Day 7:
Overall: Not Haidilao, doesn’t matter
………………………………………………. ok, ok,
Day 7 (Saturday):
Where I ate: Actually, funny story.
Who I ate with: A familiar face.
Impressions: My dining partner suggested this one for whatever reason. “Have you been here before?” they asked, and I said no, it doesn’t seem familiar. Well well, dear readers, not so. When I arrived at the restaurant I realized it was the first place I ate at in Beijing. I don’t mean the first place I ate hot pot at, but the first place I ate at, period, a whole year ago when I first visited, straight off the plane, jetlagged and feeling both physically and spiritually disheveled. It was one of those neat little coincidences that make me happy that I go out of my way to do stupid shit like this. If I don’t, who else is going to have these moments? It didn’t make me luminescent but it did, in good time, make me full of hot pot, which is as close to transcendence as I’m ever going to get, anyway.
Overall: 4/5. Hot pot is nice.
