While it’s usually best to leave the cooking to trained professionals when dining out, Mongolian hot pot is so drop dead easy that even a careful, chopstick-wielding toddler could handle it. Hot Pot, Hot Pot, a brightly-lit and well-serviced communal soup hall in Monterey Park, is the kind of place that’s perfect for small and large groups in the mood for a tummy-warming and interactive feast. The Astronomer and I headed here late one Friday night with our friends Diep and Alice.
We began by selecting a broth. Hot Pot, Hot Pot offers three bases including a mildly flavored “House Original,” a sweat-inducing “House Spicy,” and a medicinally tinged “Rejuvenation Broth.”
We chose the “Half & Half” option that allowed for two different varieties—on the left is the “House Spicy” dialed up to a seven and on the right is the “House Original.”
Once the broths were settled on, we were provided with a form listing all manner of proteins, vegetables, dumplings, and noodles to jazz up our hot pots. We may have gone overboard with over a dozen tick marks, but it was all in the name of research (and gluttony). We chose a mix of hearty ingredients that were suited for the spicy broth, as well as more delicate ones that benefited from the milder broth.
