On Friday I had to drive up to South Minneapolis to pick something up—okay, okay, it was three bottles of mezcal. As I was probably going to be up there close to lunch time I tried to figure out where I might grab a bite in the general vicinity. One of the first places I thought of was Szechuan Spice, the small Sichuan restaurant that we’ve quite enjoyed in the past. A few minutes later I discovered that they closed earlier this year—apparently, this was first said to be for renovation but they never re-opened. I was very sad to find this out as we’d liked a lot of things we’d eaten there. I was intrigued, however, to see that the space had been quickly filled with a hot pot restaurant named Kung Fu Hot Pot. As I noted Szechuan Spice’s closure in a comment on my most recent review of a meal there, I noted that I might check it out soon. Flash forward to three hours later, when the missus and I sat down at a table by the window. Here’s how it went.

Kung Fu Hot Pot opened in mid-July. In case you’d never been to Szechuan Spice, the location is on Lyndale, just short of Lake Ave. I asked our server if it was the same owners with just a concept change, but she indicated the ownership is also new. The space seems quite transformed as well. Now it’s been several years since we ate in at Szechuan Spice—well before the outbreak of the pandemic—and so I may be misremembering, but Kung Fu Hot Pot seems a lot larger than Szechuan Spice was. If you were a Szechuan Spice regular and have also been to Kung Fu Hot Pot, please let me know if I am hallucinating. Well, the decor is certainly different. And, of course, the seating is completely different. Every table has a large induction burner on it on which the pot with the soup base(s) you will cook your hot pot selections in is placed. The controls are on the side of the table and you are in charge of that (your server will tell you how it works).

Indeed, if you are getting hot pot-only, as we were, service is minimal. You let them know which soup bases you want (you can choose up to two soup bases) and then go over to the large refrigerated display which holds containers of all the things you will cook in those soup bases and make your selections. Alongside, there’s a table that holds plates and bowls and cutlery, and another self-service station that has an array of dipping sauces, toppings and condiments. They run on an all-you-can-eat model, which means, yes, in case you’re stupid, that you can take as much of whatever you want over the course of the meal. (There’s a couple of caveats: meals are capped at two hours and there’ll be a surcharge if you waste too much of what you take.)

The selection of refrigerated goodies to put in your soup base is quite broad. You can get a range of vegetarian options (mushrooms, fungi, bean curd, vegetables, greens, noodles); you can get a range of seafood (fish, blue crab, mussels, crayfish, octopus, squid); and you can get a range of meats (fatty beef, fatty lamb, tripe, sausage etc.); plus a few more things as well (fish tofu, quail eggs). The thing to do is to make an initial selection, take it back to your table and cook it in your soup bases and then replenish as the meal goes on. You don’t want to get everything/too much and dump it all in together because then most of it will overcook before you can eat some of it. Yes, you can control how hot the pot gets but it’s not terribly precise and everything will cook very quickly.

[See here for a video of all this in action.]

You can see what we ate in the slideshow below—we got our pot split between the traditional mild base and the hot & spicy base. Both bases were very good for flavouring the things we cooked in them; and I quite liked the mild one as a soup as well—I wouldn’t recommend eating the hot & spicy as a soup as it’s quite oily.

Oh, I should say that there’s also a decent-sized a la carte menu of dishes drawn from both the Sichuan and the broader American Chinese repertoire. But if you’re there for hot pot, I think it’s a mug’s game to fill yourself up with other things given that the price of the all-you-can-eat hot pot is not low: $34 for adults at lunch, Mondays-Thursdays and $37 for dinner and all-day on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (the price includes the soup bases). Childhood at Kung Fu Hot Pot ends at 10 years of age, by the way. Everyone below that age pays $17 or $24 per head, depending on how young they are; everyone above is counted as an adult. The only reason to order a la carte, I think, would be if you have someone in the party who is not going to eat the hot pot at all or is unlikely to eat enough to make it a value—perhaps a child.

But if you’re an adult with a good appetite, I think the high price is, on the whole, worth it. You can certainly make it so by loading up on the shellfish. Some of our favourites though were the fatty beef, lamb and fish (especially the latter two cooked in the spicy base). I always find things like crab and crayfish to be too fiddly to eat in a hot pot setting. The missus has no such trouble and she went through most of our selections of both on Friday.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu and what we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down to see how much we paid and to see what’s coming next.

Two adult hot pots, a strawberry milk tea and tax brought the total pre-tip to just about $87. (You pay up at the counter.) This is certainly not cheap and you could raise the price if you were drinking beer or wine (which they do have a license for). But, as I said, I think the all-you-can-eat structure makes it worth it, as long as you go hungry. If you’re not going to eat very much then it’s a lot of money to pay.

Now I’m thinking I might want to go back to Little Szechuan, whose hot pot we haven’t tried since the day they switched to that format. Are there other hot pot places in the Twin Cities you’re partial to? Let me know in the comments.

Alright, what’s next on the restaurant review front? I’m finally done with my Italy reports. I still have a few to go from Dublin (and maybe Belfast too, if I can be arsed) and a few from New York City in October. My ambition is to get through all of these before we leave for Bombay, Seoul and Delhi in early January.  Accordingly, I hope to get a couple of these out later this week. Let’s see how it goes. Not sure yet where next week’s Twin Cities report will come from—most of our regular dining out crew is inconsiderately out of town.