Hot Spot on a Cold Night

Friday, November 8, 2013 – Hot Spot on a Cold Night

A chilly fall night is the perfect time for a hot bowl of soup.  So I invited Elliott to join me for dinner at Hot Spot, a new-ish restaurant in Fairfax City that specializes in hot pots.  I enthusiastically told him that it would be an adventure in cooking and eating, sort of like a fondue party with an Asian accent.  You order a selection of items that you plunge into a steaming hot pot of broth at your table.  Then you mix up your own dipping sauce combinations for the cooked morsels.  I rattled off a list of possible ingredients, including squid, octopus, tofu and various exotic vegetables that sounded irresistible to me.  To be honest, I wasn’t surprised when Elliott declined my invitation.  So I set my back-up plan into motion and called my friend Cherie.  It didn’t take much effort to convince her that this was a culinary experience she shouldn’t miss.

As our server explained, Hot Spot has a very simple concept and procedure.  They only serve hot pots and it’s all-you-can-eat.  Each diner gets a paper ordering form and starts by choosing a type of broth from the five options (vegetarian, seafood, chicken, slightly spicy, and numbingly spicy).  Next, you check off any of the ingredients you want to cook in the broth.  There’s no limit to how much you can order, and if you want to order more, you just fill out another form.  We started with shrimp, scallops, flounder, fish cake, squid, sliced chicken and sliced sirloin (for Cherie), three kinds of mushrooms, Chinese broccoli, bok choy, spinach, rice noodles, bean sprouts, and tofu.  While we were waiting to our hot pots and ingredients to arrive, we went to the sauce bar, where we found an overwhelming variety of choices.  We decided to follow our server’s advice and stirred up a mixture of oyster sauce, soy sauce, garlic, cilantro, green onions, sesame oil, vinegar, and sesame seeds.  

 

It didn’t take long before an array of plates piled high with meats, fish and veggies covered our table and the pot of hot broth was bubbling away on a burner built into the tabletop.  Clouds of steam enveloped us as we dropped bits of food from our chopsticks into the double (divided into 2 compartments) hot pot.  Fortunately, I’ve been adept at using chopsticks since a very early age (thanks to my father, who lived in China in the 1940s and brought home his love of all things Chinese).  It took only seconds for some of the vegetables to cook and perhaps a few minutes for the seafood and meats.  While the cooked items were still piping hot, we dipped them into the sauce, which added a whole new dimension of flavor.  The food was delicious, and we could barely finish the first round of ingredients we’d ordered.  However, we couldn’t resist asking for more tofu, enoki mushrooms, and spinach.  Of course, the meal wasn’t complete until we had ladled some of the broth into our bowls.  By this time, broth’s flavor had been enhanced by all the ingredients we’d cooked in it. 

Too bad there wasn’t a dessert menu.   A small serving of ice cream would have been much appreciated.  But a big gulp of fresh night air was almost as good.