Grayson Kelly usc annenberg
Hai Di Lao Hot Pot: 2.5 Stars
The last time I had been to HaiDiLao Hot Pot was in Shangai, and it was a dinner—experience, rather—that ended with my mother literally almost dropping dead at the hot pot table itself.
My brother, a relatively recent expat in the “pearl of Asia,” was eager to force my white American parents out of their food comfort zones. At his behest, we ordered a pot of Haidilao’s famous Super Spicy Soup Base, an extremely rich and perfectly oily blend of pork bone broth seasoned heavily with Szechuan peppercorn.
One of the many beautiful things about the Szechuan peppercorn is that its heat emanates more of a buzzy heat, leaving your tongue feeling like a static television screen in the best way. The Szechuan burn feels strikingly different than the classic capsaicin sting many Americans are more accustomed to.
When the broth began came to a gentle boil, we all dug in, dunking meats and vegetables and rice cakes in the broth, all of which tasted fantastic. My brother and I looked at each other, beaming, proud of our parents for being so open to the new experience. Things quickly took a turn for the worse when my mom dipped a large cube of dehydrated tofu in the top layer of the broth—a thick film consisting solely of boiling hot Szechuan peppercorn oil—and eagerly inhaled the seemingly harmless morsel. Something went down a wrong pipe somewhere, and we all watched in horror as she began to choke and heave, all of us unable to figure out what was even happening. The rest of the restaurant went silent as staff rushed to our table to attend to my mother, whose face was slowly turning pale and blue.
You really don’t understand how shocking it is to see a group of Chinese waiters who had just been performing their famous tableside “noodle dance” attempt to give my mother the heimlich maneuver on the floor of a hot-pot restaurant. It was only when one of them raised her arms above her head and began patting her back did her windpipe clear up, and the tofu chunk flew out of her esophagus.
She ended up fine, if only with a bit of hot-pot PTSD. On the other hand, my appetite for hot pot that night was savagely ripped away. When my friend recently suggested that we try hotpot, I was more than excited to be given a reason to reintroduce myself to the pot.
What I didn’t know at the time, and quite frankly until I sat down at the Century City location, was that this was the same hot pot restaurant I’d been to in Shanghai. Haidilao Hot Pot is actually a chain, and not just any chain. Haidilao Hot Pot—the name of which is derived from a mahjong term, haidilao, meaning good fortune— was founded in China’s Sichuan province in 1994. Haidilao is known for its spicy Sichuan-style food and “impressive customer services, which include free manicure, shoe polishing and shoulder massage services, as well as noodle-pulling shows and dance performances.”
Haidilao is no small company; rather, the LLC. is a machine. The brand has become the country’s biggest chain of hot pot restaurants with more than 400 storefronts across the world. The company arrived in the U.S. in 2013, when a Haodilao location was opened in Arcadia, Los Angeles.
It was when I first walked into the restaurant--neatly tucked away in a corner of the Westfield Shopping Center, also coincidentally the location of the world’s most confusing and complicated parking structure--that my deja vu bells began to ring. In the same vein as say, In-n-Out, each Haidilao Hot Pot restaurant is set up using the same design and layout in each store. We were immediately handed an iPad menu, on which we were asked to submit our orders as soon as possible prior to sitting down. I’m not sure why this is; ordering from an iPad can make a restaurant experience feel cold and distant, but in the time of coronavirus and at a restaurant with such a long wait, the request felt only fair. We decided to order exactly what we’d come for--hot pot--and skipped the appetizers, instead choosing two orders of beef (thinly sliced ribeye and boneless short rib), one order of Tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes), and a wide arrange of fresh vegetables, including corn on the cob and cabbage.
Alongside the meat and vegetable options, Haidilao also offers seafood and poultry, all of which is meant to be cooked in one (or more) of their six broths. Patrons have the option to choose up to four of Haidilao’s six different signature broths. We decided to go with my mother’s favorite, the House Super Spicy Soup Base--alongside a miso based broth, a beef tallow broth, and a Tom Yum style base.
After about 35 minutes, our waiter led us to our table through the restaurant: a shiny, chaotic (and once compared to “P.T. Barnum’s three-ring circus” by the Wall Street Journal) plethora of packed booths filled with restaurant-goers dipping various ingredients into the bubbling cauldrons of broth centered in each table. When we sat down at our table, our waitress handed us a pair of black and red aprons. We knew what this meant, and we were excited: we would be the ones cooking our meal tonight. She also noted the “sauce bar” in the corner, which at $2.99 a person, seemed overpriced, considering the appearance of the bar itself when observed up close: a mess of spilled tahini, sticky soy sauce splashes alongside an amalgam of picked through “serve yourself”-style condiments.
When our $80 of meat was delivered to the table, we were greeted by the thinnest slices of beef that I had ever seen. When our hotpot was all set up and each broth had begun to boil, my date and I began to slowly lower our meat and vegetables into the various soups, saving the rice cakes for last. About 6 minutes later, the food was gone. Now, this could be because the food was delicious, because it was--however, for the amount of money we’d spent, we could’ve both ordered entire ribeye steaks from a steakhouse.
But at Haidilao, you’re not paying as much for the food as you are for the entire experience. There’s a certain kitschy, touristy vibe to the restaurant, which explains both the prices and the draw—but bells and whistles don’t go very far if the experience is marred by bad service, which we unfortunately experienced throughout the night.
Herein lies my mistake: if I wanted hotpot in L.A., I should not have been going to a conglomerate chain like Haidilao. A quick peer at an article in Eater would have turned me in a much better direction, and I regret not reading it further. Being new in Los Angeles, I sometimes forget that I live in a truly culturally diverse melting pot, one that provides us fortunate Angelenos with an amalgamation of cuisines, exemplified by some of the local, beloved hot pot restaurants. Take, for example, Dong Lai Shun, a Muslim-Chinese hotpot shop in San Gabriel, or Old Pasadena’s Chong Qing YaoMei Hotpot.
I, as a chef and foodie, refuse to let either my remarkable or unremarkable Haidilao experience taint the cuisine of hotpot as a whole. I, as a student, prefer to look at the dinner as a catalytic event, one that now has me saving up my money to go and experience the beauty of hotpot in one of LA’s various local spots.
Sources:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-02/17/content_28233907.htm
https://fortune.com/2021/11/10/haidilao-stock-price-hot-pot-restaurant-expansion-close-300/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324767004578485361216000412
https://la.eater.com/maps/chinese-hot-pot-restaurants-chinese-los-angeles-san-gabriel-valley
