Pre-Pandemic: Hotto Potto

I’ve already written this review once, like months ago, but this is what happens when your phone factory resets… your photos, your contacts, and at least 10,000 really important “memos,”  like this review, are lost.

On this night, Tom and I decided to make our relationship “official.” That is, our one where we go places and eat everything, he sketches, and I talk about it. We settled on Hotto Potto because a few of my staff swore it was better than Noodles and Rice (RIP…for now). I love Noodles and Rice so thought we had better check it out.

There was basically nobody in the place so Tom was immediately challenged as to what…empty…angle he wanted to take on. I was most interested in the tens of many sauces neatly organized in little plastic containers with fancy tiny dipper spoons on each table. I love all of the sauces and condiments all of the time.

The very pleasant waiter explained Hot Pot to Tom who had never imbibed before, while I patiently sat waiting to taste test every single condiment option as soon as he walked away. He pre-mixed a sauce for us which suited the less adventurous Tom. It was basically sweet. Very sweet and that is the epitome of everything Tom likes to eat.

I tried them all and found several many I could get behind. Give me all that garlic, sesame, and salty bits. Absolutely. If you have never done hot pot, it is a lot of fun to make your own creation, but can get expensive pretty quickly if you want a little bit of everything to throw in your mix, since you pay per ingredient. It is great if you can share fixings with people at your table, but then we have creatures like Tom. Chicken, spinach, and maybe he’d have a carrot. I wanted bean sprouts, water chestnuts, some Asian green variety I’d never heard of or tried before, daikon, etc. I was on my own here folks.

At hot pot they bring out you broth and nestle it onto a cooker in the middle of your table, you then submerge your ingredients and cook them as you wish before dipping them in your sauce concoction. One of those let me pay you to cook my own novelty dinner types of deals. It’s all about the experience. We cook similarly at home fairly often with hot pot, pick and mix ramens, shabu shabu, etc. but sometimes it is nice to go out.

Overall, the food was good. *I still liked Noodle and Rice better!* The wait staff was great and the place was clean with ample parking. However, we would probably try another place in the future considering this is also out of the neck of our general woods.