caitlin savage and the hotpot of awesome

Behold, my friends: the burner. It is the crucible from which all delicious things come. It warms the food above it, makes raw meat into something safely edible, infuses vegetables with juice and wrings spice and flavor from all that is placed upon it.
What you are about to witness is an adventure in food like no other. Those with weak hearts or stomachs should either refrain from reading, maintain a safe distance, or just fly to Taiwan and come with me the next time I go.

This, my friends, is hotpot.

Here is, in short, what happened:

The setting is a restaurant in Ximen, some 30 minutes from my house by bus. Although the restaurant entrance is at street-level, the restaurant itself is one story above, accessible via a flight of stairs. Inside, the lighting is warm and dim, the decor decidedly imperial; understated elegance in red, gold, and black. Each table, dark and solid like marble, has a large burner embedded in its center. Steam billows off the pots on each table burner, like smoke.

Ella and I, after being seated, ordered two kinds of soup: vegetable and spicy. We also ordered two kinds of meat: beef and lamb. We were brought the soup, which was then placed on the burner and set to heat. Ella and I then went to a giant bar full of fresh, raw food (veggies, tofu, fish, fungi) and selected anything we wanted. Anything, and everything. We then took it all back to our big dual-pot of soup and dumped the food in.

While the food cooked, we went to a separate bar and made our own dipping sauces. I put soy sauce, sesame seed oil, vinegar, and a few other things in mine. I am a sauce-making genius. My sauce was very delicious. I am not sure how this happened. Ella made something equally delicious, more fresh and rich than my sauce's salty and savory. I have a soft spot for salty, so I ate mine in earnest throughout the evening.

Ella and I, now back at our table with our sauces, took the meat strips that had been brought to us and put those into the soups, too.
Then we ate the food.
We ate it.
We ate it all.

Ella had warned me ahead of time to save myself for hotpot. "Go to the gym," she said. "Don't eat a big lunch," she said. "Or a big breakfast." And so I had labored at the gym, and I had eaten minimally throughout the day, and did that advice ever turn out to be the best I'd ever received. I ate an appalling amount of food and was only comfortably full.

I even had room afterward for the all-you-can-eat ice-cream buffet.

Let me repeat, the all-you-can-eat ice-cream buffet. With Haagen-Dazs.

I went through the ice-cream buffet twice.

This counted as one of the best nights of my life. EVER.