Hot pot on frigid Friday

Tonight Anja and I went to have hot pot for the first time. I’d only heard about it, but it’s very popular in China. It’s a sort of personal soup/fondue pot in the middle of your table and you select the ingredients you want to add. I’m not sure what’s in the base (dates, green onions, carrots, some kind of broth, cucumbers, other small veggies?) , but a pot of this is set to simmer and then they bring plates of whatever you’ve ordered and you put those ingredients in the soup broth and then take them out when they are cooked the way you like. The soup is not actually consumed. At least I think that’s how it works. We tried to figure it out by watching others in the restaurant. There are also 3 bowls of condiments that you dip the ingredients in after they are cooked. One was some kind of peanut sauce, another was a dark green piquant sauce of unknown origin, and the third looked like a square of some type of cheese covered in blackberry jelly – I have no idea what it actually was but it was tasty. The three together created a very unique and delicious flavor. The ingredients were a mystery until they arrived, since we couldn’t read the menu. We knew there was no meat since Anja doesn’t eat meat, and it wasn’t spicy, since Anja can’t deal with spicy. We tried to convey to the manager that we needed advice and he was a pretty good sport but eventually gave up. What we ended up with was delicious, and we both left completely stuffed. There were several plates of ingredients that we never even got to. Not bad for $8 total.