06/14/2022
Thank you for choosing Spicy Grandma Kitchen. We are open 11:30am - 10:00pm. 7 days a week. Phone: 312-285-2477. We are located at 2353 S Wentworth Ave Suite 5 Chicago IL 60616. No appt needed. Walk ins welcome.
We offer Chuanchuan Xiang Hot pot.
What is Hot Pot? Hot pot is less of a dish than it is an experience, encapsulating the communal dining ethos that so many Western restaurants have only recently taken on. Think of it as an adaptation of the stone soup fairy tale: you team up with a group of friends to cook an array of ingredients—thinly sliced meats, mushrooms, head-on shrimp, Chinese lettuces, fresh noodles, and more—in a single pot of simmering, seasoned broth heated on an induction burner or electric range. Once cooked to your liking, you dip it in the sauce of choice and eat it. Rinse and repeat until extremely full. Where does it come from? There are as many variations on hot pot as there are households in China, but there are definitely distinct regional styles. The original, introduced to East Asia thousands of years ago by the Mongolian Empire, was a simple broth served with horse meat and mutton. (The apocryphal story describes it as a dish eaten on-the-go in the helmets of Mongolian soldiers.) As their cultural influence spread, so did the hot pot, taking on myriad forms in Northern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
What is included? The there are three basic components to Hot Pot: broth, dipping ingredients, and sauces.Broth:
A single hot pot restaurant in the United States will often offer several broths to choose from, though indecisive folks can sometimes opt for a combination served in the same pot with a metal divider. The most well-known style is a basic cloudy broth made from chicken, ginger, goji berries, and other aromatics. My personal favorite is the bold and numb-spicy Chongqing variant, which is chock-full of Sichuan peppercorns, red chillies, preserved mustard greens, and basically anything else you’d typically find in a Sichuanese chef’s spice rack. You could opt for a savory mushroom broth, sweet-and-sour tomato, or, in some places, even a coconut-infused seafood tom kha variant.
Dipping Ingredients:
As for the hot pot ingredients themselves, restaurants will usually offer a good mixture of thin-sliced meats—from pork belly to lamb shoulder to filet mignon—meatballs, vegetables, noodles, dumplings, and rice cakes that you can order a la carte. Sometimes they’ll offer combination platters with a good balance of proteins and vegetables. For example, Tang Hot Pot in New York City offers a beautiful-sounding “Sichuan Adventurer” set that includes delicacies like chicken gizzards, Asian swamp eel, beef tripe, crown daisy leaves, vermicelli noodles, and enoki mushrooms. But that’s the fancy stuff. You also can’t go wrong with ordering a pyramid of semi-frozen shaved ribeye, a clutch of hand-cut noodles, and bok choi and calling it a day.Most places will offer a variety of sauces to dip your cooked ingredients in, and you’re welcome to use them or not. Some might even offer a whole DIY station with individual elements for you to mix, including minced cilantro, oyster sauce, sesame oil, and black vinegar, with suggestions for newbies. For many hot pot fans, the dipping sauce is a very personal thing, so if you want that extra scoop of garlic, fly that freak flag. Here’s a tip: if you see chive flower sauce on the menu, order it. It’s packed full of umami and tastes amazing with everything.
