Photo by Neil Horsky
Hotpot spread at Back Street BBQ & Hotpot
Hotpot spread at Back Street BBQ & Hotpot
Visiting a Korean hotpot restaurant is a unique and extravagant culinary experience that expectedly comes with a hefty price tag. Hotpot is often all-you-can-eat, with servers bringing you tray after tray of artfully presented food ingredients for literal hours. Even the table itself is special, with a personal burner embedded in the tabletop near your seat for your simmering hotpot, and another large communal flame in the center of the table for barbecuing.
Desiring to experience a Korean hotpot after many years but unwilling to fit the typical bill, I invited a friend to Back Street BBQ & Hotpot on the East Side for their $21.95 hotpot lunch special. While that figure isn’t tiny, considering the quality, quantity and variety of the offerings, it is actually quite a bargain. Plus the meal served as “linner,” as I needed not any substantial dinner that night, given the massive feast set upon us.
Personal pots of broth bubbled beside each of our seats. We both chose the traditional bone broth soup base but there are a handful of other soup base options, including a vegan mushroom broth, if a simple bone broth doesn’t suit you. Sliced lamb, beef, pork and fish are delivered raw on platters. Other platters and baskets are brought forth, displaying a variety of raw vegetables, mushrooms, dumplings, meatballs, tofu, noodles and more. One-by-one you tong them all up and over to your hotpot, drop them in, wait a few minutes, and ladle them out into a smaller bowl to eat from. In this small bowl you add your sauces and toppings. Seemingly any and every sauce and topping is available from the nearby sauce and topping bar, including chili and sesame oils, soy, peanut, hoisin and special house sauces, cilantro, scallions, lemon slices, dried chilis, fried or minced garlic, and on and on.
New Culinary Adventures
Photo by Neil Horsky
Cooking hotpot at Back Street BBQ & Hotpot
Cooking hotpot at Back Street BBQ & Hotpot
Each round of platters and baskets offers new culinary adventures that you not only consume but cook yourself, exploring texture and flavor combinations that vary throughout your meal. This is active and engaged eating! I hadn’t seen my friend for a little while and was hoping to catch up with him but turns out a hotpot is not the place for that, because we were both too busy experimenting with our soups to talk about anything besides what the wood ear mushroom tastes like with the fish balls and watercress. I’d say we had more fun sharing our present experience than we would have recapping our recent pasts to one another.
I should also mention that included in the lunch special are unlimited appetizers and desserts. We only ordered kimchi and rice for starters, since we were eager to try the hotpot, but they do offer a wide selection of Korean and Chinese classics if you’re looking to take full advantage of their all-you-can-eat policy. Just don’t overdo it on your first course! By the time dessert rolled around I definitely didn’t need it but I twisted my own arm to top off my meal with a tiny slice of chocolate cake and a few stewed fruits.
My hotpot experiments led to some practical takeaways for next time. I learned that udon noodles hold up much better than ramen noodles in the simmering broth. I learned taro takes a while to soften up but once it does, it absorbs the broth and makes for a delicious starchy bite. I learned how to manage the burner, cranking it up when adding lots of ingredients then reducing to a slow simmer to avoid overcooking the more delicate ingredients and burning my face off when sipping from my bowl.
The beautiful and bountiful options at a hotpot evoke a sort of kingly feeling, a decadence, and it’s true, hotpot is a treat, but it’s also humbling. You are being served like royalty but you’re also serving yourself. You have much more agency and involvement in the food preparation than you would out at a normal restaurant. The shifting soup flavors are unique to you and your decisions. This might seem like too much pressure for some diners at first but trust me, the learning curve is short and the whole experience is fun and rewarding, leaving you not just with a good meal but with a sense of ownership in that meal’s creation. Find Back Street BBQ and Hotpot on the East Side at 2116 N. Farwell Ave, which is a few blocks south of North Ave. The lunch special is from noon to 4 p.m., Monday through Thursday. Come on down and own your afternoon out!
