Hot Pot City

By Walker MacMurdo

1975 SW 1st Ave., 224-6696. Lunch and dinner daily.

Here's how hot pot works in the city devoted to it. Once seated, choose one of the several broths on the menu (all meals are $10.75 for lunch, $14.75 for dinner and $10 for kids). The Thai hot and sour is neither too hot nor too sour, for gentle tongues. After your waiter brings your utensils and personal pot of roiling broth, head to the buffet station and pile your plate with meat—a rotating cast of beef, pork, and chicken cuts, seafood—including fish balls, oysters and unknowable fleshy masses, noodles of the glass, udon and ramen varieties and just about every vegetable under the sun. Grab some sauces—soy, chili, ponzu and so forth—and a soft drink. Dump your plate into the broth. Wait an appropriate amount of time, longer for chicken, and then fish your fixins out with the scoop, dunk them in your sauces and eat. Repeat until there is no longer space in your stomach.

Check out Willamette Week's 2016 Cheap Eats guide here.

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