Hot pot

As an introduction to Asian cuisine, the CUHK Globers invited us newcomers to a Hot pot dinner. Six stories up, just off the Wan Chai metro stop, we found ourselves in a bustling, steamy room at tables seating 10.

Although there is probably a more formal translation, a hot pot is a make-your-own dinner, which begins with a large pot of boiling water placed in the centre of the table. One then orders meat, vegetables and spices and dumps it all in the pot. When the ingredients have boiled, a shared pair of chopsticks are used to snatch what you want out of the pot and onto your plate, before you then use your own chopsticks to eat. At the end there is a delicious soup in the pot, a bowl of which finishes off the meal.

Our pot was a spicy pot - using chilli, soya sauce, spring onions and a hot peanut paste to create flavour, we added beef, tomato, lettuce, prawn, squid and chicken to begin with. Later we added pumpkin, and several more meats. Worthy of mention is cuttlefish, which was ground into little white meatballs and is delicious, and coagulated pigs blood, which had a slightly bitter taste, but a very unpleasant texture of gelatine.

Embracing traditions in any country makes for enlightening experiences. Meat is chopped irrespective of whether the meat contains bones or not, and fish have rarely been de-boned. Since there are no knives or forks - only chopsticks - you eat the meat in one mouthful and spit out the bones as you find them. Also, hot pot is great for improving your chopstick-technique, since the slightly boring lettuce is easy enough to fish out, whereas the juicy taiwanese meatballs are an entirely different matter!

For a 2½ hour dining session of all you can eat, including a pint of beer, I paid 150 HKD. So we treated ourselves to "cotton ice" in a nearby dessert shop before heading back to CUHK.