How to Eat Hot Pot at a Restaurant

The pot comes with a metal wall down the middle. One side is red and oily, dried chiles on the surface. The other is pale enough that you can see the bottom. A plate of raw beef is still pink beside it. Wait until both sides are actually boiling.

The split is a yuanyang pot. Yuanyang is the word for a mandarin duck. The two broths share one pot, each on its own side. In a Chongqing or Sichuan room, the red side is mala: chile and Sichuan pepper, hot and numbing at once. Sichuan pepper is the berry that numbs. The sheen on that red side is often beef tallow. The pale side is the milder one, tomato or mushroom or a plain bone broth. If the whole table wants the heat, skip the wall and take a single pot. If someone wants out of the chile, keep it.

A mutton house is a different evening. Beijing instant-boiled mutton, shuan yangrou, is paper-thin lamb in a clear broth. Beijing's tourism office says to lift each slice as soon as the color changes. The broth barely seasons the meat. The sesame bowl does.

A coconut-and-chicken pot is a Hainan room. A Chaozhou room puts beef balls in a light broth.

For two people, start small. One plate of thin beef or lamb, a leafy green, some tofu, and glass noodles for later. Frozen tofu, when they have it, drinks the broth up. Add mushrooms, or a plate of meatballs, if the table wants one more plate. When that first plate is gone, order the next. A whole tray of raw meat dumped in at once cools the pot.

At a mutton table, the bowl starts with sesame paste. Around it you will usually find fermented bean curd, chive-flower paste, soy sauce, and chili oil. Add a little, taste it, then decide. At a red-broth table, sesame oil and a bit of raw garlic cool each slice. In the bigger rooms the sauces sit on a counter, and you mix the bowl there. One bowl is enough to start. You can go back.

Cook a few slices and take them out when the pink is gone. Thin beef on the red side is the same. Meatballs, potato, and lotus root can stay in the pot. They take longer. Greens go in after the meat has had a turn. They collapse quickly, and if they go in first the slices have nowhere to cook.

If there is a little strainer, or a second pair of chopsticks, use that for the raw plate.

Save the glass noodles. They go in when the broth already tastes like the meat and the greens.

You can sit down alone. Ask for a small pot and one broth. Xiabuxiabu, a Beijing chain, sells the meal that way, one pot for each person. You choose the broth, then you cook it.