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Lunch today was at Red N Hot, a Szechuan restaurant on the Charing Cross Road. As there were four of us, we decided to go for the buffet style hot pot.
Szechuan hot pots are a cook-at-the-table style meal, where a huge bubbling bowl of soup (in our case two soups in a yin-yang divided bowl, one mild, one hot), is used to cook a tray full of meats and vegetables. Ours came with a huge pile of food: fish, tofu, beef, pork, ham, tripe, various cabbages, prawns, and, yes, spam. Throw them into the soup, and you have an amazing stew that you can modify as you go.
It's a meal that demands good friends, as you discuss what to do next, while you reach over each other, fishing out morsels of food. There's no rush - the table's hot plate keeps the soup roiling, and the staff come by with kettles of stock to make sure you have plenty of liquid for that next piece of food from the waiting tray - and they'll bring more of what ever you ant, if you find you want more than the original generous servings.
We spent a good two or three hours there, just slowly working our way through the various combinations - a friendly feast that really was rather cheap for central London. Not bad at all.
Recommended for anyone who like spicy food...
(We rounded things off with coffee and cakes at Milk Bar, a Kiwi coffee shop around the corner in Soho.)
Szechuan hot pots are a cook-at-the-table style meal, where a huge bubbling bowl of soup (in our case two soups in a yin-yang divided bowl, one mild, one hot), is used to cook a tray full of meats and vegetables. Ours came with a huge pile of food: fish, tofu, beef, pork, ham, tripe, various cabbages, prawns, and, yes, spam. Throw them into the soup, and you have an amazing stew that you can modify as you go.
It's a meal that demands good friends, as you discuss what to do next, while you reach over each other, fishing out morsels of food. There's no rush - the table's hot plate keeps the soup roiling, and the staff come by with kettles of stock to make sure you have plenty of liquid for that next piece of food from the waiting tray - and they'll bring more of what ever you ant, if you find you want more than the original generous servings.
We spent a good two or three hours there, just slowly working our way through the various combinations - a friendly feast that really was rather cheap for central London. Not bad at all.
Recommended for anyone who like spicy food...
(We rounded things off with coffee and cakes at Milk Bar, a Kiwi coffee shop around the corner in Soho.)
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(Actually, I liked it. I love hotpot. Nobody is surprised at this.)