火锅 is hot pot

Hot pot is exactly what it sounds like, but it's also much better than it sounds. Hot is the spice and the food and the oil and the air. Hot is your skin and your throat and the eel after it cooks. Pot is the container sitting in the middle of your table, with its contents boiling and rolling and making everything better. And it is beloved here in Chengdu.

Maybe it’s eating oil-boiled food straight out of the pot in August, and maybe it’s the spice, but eating hot pot makes you sweat. It's also all about the thrill of the chase, spelunking around in spicy broth using chopsticks and ladles and serrated spoons to find all of the things you’d dropped in earlier.

The hardest part is keeping yourself from eating the items that need more time to cook – the lotus root that given time will become soft and chewy, the quail eggs whose insides melt into orbs of molten yolk if you can wait. But at the same time you should hurry up and get at the pieces that are ready much more quickly, the thin slices of meat and the sheets of tofu skin. It’s both hard to wait and hard to know. And it’s hard to catch every bit of Sichuan pepper before it sneaks onto your tongue and the numbness sets in.

What you drop in the pot to soak up the spice is up to you. There were pork & coriander meatballs presented on cucumber slices. And there was eel… it came to the table fresh and horror-show-bloody but when it came out of the pot it had been transformed into something so good and rich and right. It was instantly something we’d order every time.

But one of the things we’d ordered, a sort of thick rice noodles, just never turned up – except on the bill. We pointed this out to the server and then like clockwork another server came over and produced the missing dish from thin air. (Actually she found it on the lowest rung of a small stand next to our table.) It was strange to discover the missing dish hiding like that when all of the others had been so dramatically delivered to our table or even dumped into our pot by a server. So in a sort of ultimate Chinese test, where a passing grade would mean a whopping $2 off of our bill, we told the server what we thought.

And we passed the test. Not only did they take the rice noodles off of our bill, but we received a very educational explanation about why the noodles had never made it onto our table in the first place. Something about how Server 1 had put the noodles on the shelf but had neglected to tell Servers 2, 3 or 4 that they were there. Naturally this would be a problem in a restaurant where one person is assigned to bring an item near the table, another puts it onto the table, still another dumps it into the pot, yet another swoops in to remove the empty plate, and 16 others circle at all times just to keep the air moving. Not that we begrudge the breeze. Like I said, hot pot makes you sweat.