![]() Our waiter handed us a pencil and a sheet of paper with a roll call of broth, meat, vegetables, and seafood options to choose from. We were seated on the sidewalk, which’d been transformed into a covered wooden deck. It was chilly and I was too hungry not to take hot pot on. All to the beat of cheekily dubbed pop hits from the past five years - to my knowledge, that was most definitely not Sia singing “Chandelier.” The only place still humming was a restaurant “as seen in the Daily News,” a standing sidewalk sign off Mott not inconspicuously pointed out: Sichuan Hot Pot.Ĭozily nestled on an emptied out Pell Street, Sichuan Hot Pot has the kind of outdoor setup that spills onto the street, almost like a scene straight out of Hong Kong: tables set up right on the narrow concrete road, cars be damned (and not a problem, thanks to New York’s Open Streets program) portable gas burners throning at the center of each, with patrons tossing an array of edible goods into the simmering broth. My holy trinity of Ping’s, Wo Hop, and Shanghai 21 were closing up even the usually bumping Doyers Street was eerily quiet. in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and my go-to strip of Mott Street restaurants had already called it a night. These prized sun-drenched days lasted well into the fall.īut this fateful October night was the first day it felt frisky in the city. As New York reopened in phases over the spring and summer, a sunny day was like a precious slice of forgotten normalcy, with locals of every borough racing to the nearest park or patio. New York City was riding off a summer high of outdoor dining, the warm weather injecting a jolt of life in a city that was the world’s COVID-19 epicenter back in March 2020. And the pandemic that wholly prevents the kind of group gathering hot pot so clearly beckons. The pandemic that ravaged the hospitality industry. ![]() The pandemic that, at its onset, resulted in the ugly and racist boycott of Chinatowns across the world. ![]() See, I fell in love with hot pot in the middle of the pandemic. I’ll take baskets upon baskets of dim sum, a whole suckling pig, and the king crab cooked three ways, anytime.īut that very much changed this fall. ![]() But in the Asian world of shared family-style feasts, hot pot scores very low on my list. Still, I was not convinced.ĭon’t get me wrong, there are certain aspects of hot pot I love - the communal gathering, the DIY cooking, the fanfare of it all. I’m pretty sure every family trip we took to Taiwan involved a distant relative bringing us to their favorite local spot, from Taipei to Tainan. There was the shabu shabu place my Boston college friends swore by, and all of the hottest Chongqing-style imports I tested out with delighted expats in Manhattan’s Chinatown. There were the hot pot gatherings of my youth, at Chinese restaurants tucked away in Paris’ 9ème arrondissement.
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