Hot Pot in Chongqing

These photos are from the restaurant where we had hot pot. Hot pot is a local dish in Chongqing. There are two rings to the hot pot. Both are heated to boil the food before you eat it family style at a table of about 8 people. The inner ring is the hot spicy broth. I don't know what makes it spicy, but the liquid is red. The outer ring is chicken broth and is clear. It is not spicy at all. The wait staff came around and dumped a bunch of the food around the hot pot into the hot liquids and then wait for it to cook. The way this works is that when the broth boils again, the food is cooked. We were all a little leary of having the meat cook so short a time, so we gave it extra time after it started boiling. There were many different kinds of food to cook in the hot pot: beef, chicken, fish, sweet potato jelly (no one tried this at our table!), vegetables, and lots of different kinds of noodles. I stuck with eating the things that were cooked in the outer ring. They were very good, especially when you dipped the cooked food into the sauce that was provided. We also put garlic in the sauce, and they was quite tasty. DH said that the noodles didn't really absorb the spiciness from the inner ring very much, but that the meat and vegetables did. He said it was quite spicy, but delicious. He LOVED this place, and spent lots of time eating all kinds of things cooked in the spicy inner ring. Dad and I didn't eat as much. Me because Gracie was cranky, and I don't think Dad liked it very much. He said later that he doesn't like soup, but I didn't understand that statement, since it was really not "soup." Anyway, out of the 3 of us, DH liked it the most. When we got back to our room, I noticed that everything we had with us, our clothes, the diaper bag, ... all smelled like garlic. So that's what a hot pot is all about.