Photo by Bella Capuano/The Choate News
Bubbling in a small aluminum pot are vegetables, raw squid, udon noodles, and cuttlefish balls. This is one of the many combinations you’d find at Hot Pot, the latest addition to Wallingford’s food scene. With roots in traditional Chinese cuisine, Hot Pot allows customers to cook meats, vegetables, dumplings, noodles, and seafood in their own pot of steaming broth.
At the beginning of each meal, customers choose their broth. Hot Pot serves five types of broths, which vary in spice level: oxtail with wolfberry; Korean kimchi; tomato and pickled cabbage; Szechuan hot and spicy; and chicken with American ginseng.
Customers then order the items they want to add to their broths. Hot pots can contain anything from snow peas to oysters. Customers can add vegetables such as bok choy, corn, and broccoli, as well as meat and seafood dishes such as sliced chicken breast and jumbo shrimp. They can also add noodles, pork dumplings, tofu, and fish cakes. The portions are large, so it’s often better to order small amounts of each dish to get a variety of flavors.
On tables are electric heaters that customers use to boil their selected broth. A thermometer helps customers ensure that their broth stays at the preferred temperature. Vegetables are typically added to the simmering pots of soup first because of their long cooking times. Meat, seafood, and other dishes are added later.
To add extra flavor to the dishes, the restaurant also provides a sauce bar where customers can mix the likes of peanut oil, vinegar, and soy sauce to their liking. As for beverages, Hot Pot offers ten flavors of bubble tea, including favorites like mango and jasmine, and slush smoothies with add-on options like fruit jelly and white pop boba.
Hot Pot owner Eric Huang and his wife, Jian Li, are not newcomers to the restaurant industry. Locals of Watertown, the couple also own Hunan Wok Restaurant, a takeout restaurant in Naugatuck that serves American-influenced Chinese food. Mr. Huang was excited to open a traditional hot pot restaurant in Wallingford because of his love for authentic Chinese food. “Wallingford’s large Asian population brought me here because my food is traditional Chinese, not American-Chinese,” said Mr. Huang.
