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Irene Jay Liu

Oh, how far the humble hotpot has come. 
More than three centuries ago, the Qing dynasty poet Yuan Mei, a renowned foodie of his time, didn't have much good to say about ubiquitous dish. 'In the chafing dish, everything is at the same temperature. The flavour disappears,' he wrote. 
If only Yuan could see the hotpot of today, a culinary phenomenon endowed with as many variations and interpretations as any in the history of Chinese cuisine. 
But what would Yuan have said of Hong Kong's many hotpot offerings? Huo guo, or 'fire pot', is nominally Chinese, but the city's less-traditional hotpot outlets draw inspiration and ingredients from far-flung places - Thailand's spicy, sweet and sour tom yum  kung gets a creamy cappuccino topping, squid balls are stuffed with cheese and black truffles, and frozen tofu and beef are dunked in English oxtail soup. Even the hotpot staples of beef and lamb are now global travellers - marbled wagyu from Japan, Angus beef from Texas, and lamb from Inner Mongolia and New Zealand. 
Yuan, an intellectual, would have to agree that hotpot has come a long way - it is said to have appeared as early as the  Eastern Han dynasty (25-220) or the Three Kingdoms period (220-280). The first hotpots were used to cook mutton or beef as offerings to the gods and ancestors, and were subsequently consumed, according to tradition. 
Lin Hong, a poet of the Southern Song dynasty, about 1,000 years later, raved about a hotpot meal of rabbit cooked in water, wine, soy sauce and pepper in his book, Simple Foods of the Mountain Folk.
But hotpot really arrived during the Qing dynasty, when it moved from the peasant table to the imperial banquet, reaching the status of qian sou yan, or 'thousand elders banquet', during the Kangxi and Qianlong eras. In the intervening centuries, hotpot took on regional flavours: Beijing's preoccupation with mutton, Sichuan's numbing love of huajiao, its namesake peppercorn, and the clear, soothing seafood hotpots of Southern China.
It also became the nomad's food for the Chinese diaspora. Legend says Genghis Khan introduced the hotpot concept as a method of feeding his soldiers, who would eat out of their helmets. Putting aside the dearth of historical proof and questions about the practicality of eating out of your headgear, the legend is an apt metaphor for the hotpot's transferability across time and space.
Almost all Chinese who have left the region - for school, work or love - have stories of one-pot dinners  over the stove, or collective winter dinners with friends and family who were also far away from home. 
My parents arrived in the US from Taiwan in the 1970s, and while growing up in the Midwest  of the United States, I remember winter dinners huddled around the electric fryer, water boiling in the searing-hot, definitely child-unfriendly square pan. St Louis in the 1980s boasted only a handful of Chinese restaurants and a small Chinese grocer who sold mostly canned and packaged goods from Taiwan. 
For my immigrant parents, the hotpot was one of the few things that could be accomplished without too much regional compromise - boiling water, thinly sliced beef, frozen shrimp and fishballs, and a plastic-wrapped chunk of silken tofu. Canned shacha sauce - a savoury and slightly spicy compote of soya bean oil, garlic, shallots, chillis, brill fish and dried shrimp commonly used in Fujianese,  Chiuchow and Taiwanese cuisine, with soy sauce as the dipping sauce. 
Now, the hotpot is spreading across the world. Little Sheep, a mainland-based franchise of hotpot restaurants, has hundreds of locations across Asia, the United States and Canada, and has begun selling its hotpot soup base in supermarkets globally. In 2008, it issued its first IPO in Hong Kong to fund its  expansion. 
Hotpot has grown up and moved out of its home-based origins - it's travelling the world and taking on new flavours and hues. But this isn't news for Hong Kong's hotpot aficionados. The diverse world of hotpot has already arrived, and Yuan Mei would have been proud.
Now that colder weather is here, it's time to dig in: explore our recommendations on the best hotpots in various categories.



Steams like old times