Heng Ji Hotpot

I find myself wondering quite a bit these days if I'm ever going to see the sun again. It's been what, three weeks now? of straight rain? And I can't believe that it's actually cold - we were in denial for a long time, sitting around our house wearing three sweaters, hats, scarves, etc. until finally our friend who was here from the East Coast informed us that is was in fact legitimately cold. Now we have a space heater that I spend my days parked squarely in front of.

But the upside of all this cold, drizzly weather is that it's great for hotpot! Growing up, we never had hotpot very often because my dad said it was like drinking water with some meats and vegetables thrown in, which I believe is actually something called "soup." But in any case, my dad didn't like hotpot, so it was a pretty rare occurrence in our house. But now we're here in Taiwan, and I'm prepared to take full advantage of being here to eat all the hotpot my stomach desires.

Tonight we hit up Heng Ji (亨記), located behind the old Sogo on Zhongxiao. I like this kind of hotpot - the kind that allows you just to choose what kinds of broth you want, and then you decide what you want to put in it and it's all you can eat - as opposed to hotpot places that come with set platters. I thought the selection here was pretty good also - there were the different kinds of sliced meats, seafood such as shrimp, oysters, and crabs, veggies, meatballs, noodles, different tofus, different fishballs. Oh! And they had ice-cream, which was better than I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be that icy, fake tasting ice-cream they often serve at places with free ice-cream, but the ice-cream here was not bad at all.

(our hotpot "liao")

We picked the pork based broth and the "ma la," which translates loosely to something like, "numbingly spicy." Oddly enough, even though I know what "ma la" means in Chinese, I didn't think it was going to be that spicy and so I foolishly took a big sip of it. Then I paid dearly for my mistake and spent the next several minutes gulping down many glasses of plum juice, which supposedly cuts down on the heat, but really didn't help that much. I seriously thought about just stuffing some tissues in my mouth to try to absorb some of the spiciness. So yeah, that "ma la" is indeed very spicy, to say the least.


I just looked at the weather forecast and all I see are little boxes filled with clouds for the rest of this week. Sigh. But in the meantime, go enjoy some hotpot!

EDIT: I just wrote this whole thing and I realized that I forgot to mention how much this costs! It's 389NT plus 10% service charge (cheaper on weekdays during lunch and late night).

Heng Ji (亨記) - Ding Hao branch (頂好店)
www.huang-chi-mala.com.tw
Fuxing South Road, Section 1, Lane 107, No. 40
(02) 8771 - 8960