Honestly, we didn’t really go shopping at Jiefangbei since we were really hungry and we wanted to just find a place to eat. We wandered around a few streets in Jiefangbei but my friend didn’t really fancy any so we decided to just eat at the cluster of restaurants near our hostel. We started trying to hail a cab in Jiefangbei but had trouble getting one. We walked into one of the streets just outside the shopping street but couldn’t get one either.
It turned out to be an extremely frustrating night because we couldn’t get a cab for more than an hour. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to hail a cab here. Most of the cabs were already taken. Some enterprising people on motorcycles would offer to bring us to our destination for a fee but most of them said it was too far. I didn’t want to try riding a motorcycle in China either. Other enterprising taxi drivers already with passengers in them would ask us where we want to go. But all of them didn’t want to take us. It seemed that our hostel was quite distant. Which was sort of true. Besides, I also didn’t like the idea of sharing a cab with a complete stranger, call me paranoid but the passenger just might be cahoots with the driver and hold us up.
After an hour of trying to get a cab, we finally got one. Fortunately, I already know how to get to our place. If just mentioned the name of the group of restaurants near our place and we were off. I was really proud of myself being able to tell the driver where to go. After the usual ups and downs of traveling in Chongqing, we finally got to the group of restaurants. We paid the taxi driver and went in the nearest restaurant.
The restaurant was a hotpot place. Hotpot 火锅 is a specialty of Chongqing, it is basically steaming hot broth, where diners would just dump all the ingredients into the pot. In Chongqing, the typical broth used is the hot and numbing broth 麻辣. You can also choose to have two different kinds of broth if you want. I was going through the menu but they all were gibberish to me. I ordered some broth not knowing what it was. All I know was I ordered the hot and numbing broth and another kind, something with mushroom in its name.
What I didn’t know what this is more pricey, but in the end it didn’t really matter much since the broth was good. It is very important to have a good tasting broth since this is where all the flavor would come from. It is better to eat hotpot with a lot of friends, since you can get to order a lot of different stuff to dump into the broth. Since there were only two of us eating, we cannot order as much as we wanted to. I order some bacon, beef, fishballs and some pork. For Chongqing hotpot, we got some sesame oil and sesame paste dip the food in. Actually, I end up using the dip to cool the stuff down. It can get really hot.
Finally, our food came, there wasn’t much preparation to be done since all of it was not cooked. We waited for the broth to boil then we started throwing everything into the pot. Hungry as we were, we needed to be more patient, since it will take more time to cook our own food. Finally, some of the meat was cooked so we started eating. The hot and numbing broth was a blood red sea of chili, but being a chili lover, I didn’t mind this. I probably won’t be using the lame non-spicy broth. We dumped most of the stuff into the hot and numbing broth and it certainly absorbed the flavor of the broth.
The hot and numbing broth is made primarily of dried chili, bean paste and Sichuan prickly ash or 花椒. The prickly ash is also called Sichuan pepper and is a main ingredient of a lot of Sichuan food. Eating the Sichuan pepper will impart a numbing sensation on the lips and tongue. Some people won’t like the feeling but I am definitely okay with it. It was my friend’s first time to take Sichuan pepper and unknowingly at quite a few, his lips quickly turned numb and he was wondering what was wrong. I would like to think that Sichuan pepper numbs the lips and tongue so that we can continue to eat more of the spicy stuff. Besides, it gives Sichuan food that distinctive delicious smell.
Not before long, my lips were also tingling from numbness. It seems like just having the broth will already numb my lips. It think it was time to make use of the other broth. The broth had some sort of “wild” mushroom, more like a fungus. The broth was not spicy at all but was a welcome departure from the deadly spicy broth we have been having. The fungus itself was edible and I actually ate the entire thing. It had a lacy texture but when eaten it is quite crunchy.
People can eat Chongqing hotpot for hours on end and it is quite common to see buffets in restaurants centered around Chongqing hotpot. But since we only ordered ala carte, we only got four dishes. Besides, my friends isn’t really that big an eater. The restaurant itself wasn’t really anything special. We ate at the terrace on top of the restaurant, it actually has a view of the Chongqing CBD but by this time most of the lights were already turned off. Still it was a wonderful end to a very tiring day. It would be our first and last night in Chongqing, for we would be moving on to our next destination the next day.
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