My First Time at Hot Pot

This past weekend I went out for my friend's birthday, and we decided to go to a hot pot restaurant, Chubby Cattle, in Philadelphia. Hot pot is a cooking method that originated in China. Basically, the idea behind it is cooking meats/vegetables/other ingredients in a steaming pot of soup stock. The menu was set up by choosing a base (soup), noodles and or rice, meat, and whatever vegetables and other "toppings." Each seat had its stove where you would place your soup and adjust the temperature to your liking. The ingredients were freshly cut and completely raw. The rest of the dish was up to how we created it. It was pretty cool to cook our food because we could customize each bowl of soup from our base. It was fun to try others' dishes and experiment with different ingredients. You could also serve a small serving from your hot pot, so you can adjust accordingly if you aren't fond of one. In addition to our soup, we were also able to create our sauce by adding different things like cilantro, chili oil, peanut butter, barbecue sauce, etc., to a soy sauce base. This sauce was used to mix with our soup, rice, noodles. Overall I thought it was a fun experience but thought the prices were relatively high for food that we essentially had to prepare. In addition, sometimes ordering a soup, you don't like or messing something up like undercooking or overcooking your meat could lead to unfavorable results. I would still recommend everyone to try hot pot once!