My Fulbright Year in Taiwan

We went to a fun hot pot 火鍋 restaurant for dinner last night. If you’ve never had Chinese hot pot before, it can be described as a cross between soup and fondue. You have a boiling pot of soup in front of you, and during the course of the meal, you add raw goodies to the soup, picking them out when they’re done, dipping them in sauce, and eating them. At the end of the meal, you can drink the rich soup that you’ve gradually made through cooking your goodies. It’s a fun way to eat, and it’s popular in Taiwan in the winter.

At this restaurant, everyone makes their own hot pot. The pots are embedded in the table in front of you , and you can control the temperature of the heater under the pot. They start you out with a soup stock, and give you a large bowl of vegetables, tofu, and other goodies. You choose what kind of meat you want. The menu had the usual boring choices of pork, chicken, lamb, beef, and seafood. What caught my eye was “ostrich.” Then I saw “alligator.” Now I had a dilemma: what to choose?

I decided on the ostrich, and Evan tried the alligator.

The consensus at the table was that the alligator tastes better than ostrich. Ostrich tastes like a cross between chicken and beef. Alligator is like very tender chicken. But both are tasty. We give them two thumbs up!