Chinese Hot Pot

Have you ever heard the phrase “Chinese Hot Pot”? Do you know what it is?
I am working at a Chinese Hot Pot restaurant in Shinjuku, and today I’m going to talk about Hot Pot and hope you get knowledge about it before you would eat it in the near future (I hope lol).




Chinese Hot Pot is, as it is called, the meal from China. Some people say the origin is from Mongolia, but now it is famous for Chinese cuisine. Hot Pot is like a Japanese Nabemono such as Shabu Shabu, and its original characteristic is found in the pot and the soup.



They use a metal pot which has two partitions, and they can enjoy two types of soup: Baitang and Mala. Baitang is white, mild soup which is made by stewing pig bones, sea foods and so on. Mala is red, spicy and numbing soup which has red chili peppers and Japanese pepper (山椒) in it.

We can enjoy any kind of ingredient to put in.



The main ingredient is sliced meat such as lamb, beef, chicken and pork.



Chinese people especially like lamb because it has low calories. They like meat balls including lamb balls, beef balls, pork balls and chicken balls as well. In addition, we can put in many kind of seafood such as shrimp, squid, sliced fish, shark fin (フカヒレ) or even we can enjoy shrimp balls and squid balls.



Of course, we can put many vegetables: cabbage, lettuce, pumpkin, potato, sweet potato, yam, spring onion, bean sprout, Chinese radish (daikon), spinach, wax gourd, bok choy (青梗菜), coriander, Chinese mushroom, Chinese hackberry (enoki), cellophane noodles and so on. We also can enjoy dumplings, tofu, tofu skin (湯葉) and frozen tofu. People usually eat noodle such as Chinese noodle, egg noodle or even instant noodle. In Japan, people make rice gruel (雑炊) with white soup.


It seems that Japanese people like to eat nabemono in winter. However, Chinese people eat hot pot in all seasons whether it is hot or cold. Chinese people say that it is good to eat hot pot especially in summer because we can get power and stamina to overcome hot summer. We can eat any kind of food including meat, seafood, vegetables and noodles. It means that we can get great variety of nutrition by eating hot pot. Soup itself also has good nutrition, so hot pot has many advantages!



Hot pot is really tasty and it is really good for our health. If you want to be healthier through eating food, you definitely should eat hot pot. And if you want to eat it in Japan, you must come to the hot pot restaurant where I work for! Everybody! Come to my restaurant! I will entertain you with Chinese hot pot!