Usually when I crave Chinese food, I drive west to Catonsville or Ellicott City, where the strip malls and shopping centers along Baltimore National Pike form their own long restaurant row. But traffic-filled car rides can defeat the purpose of comfort food.
So it was that I finally walked—walk being the operative term here, as I can walk from my home to Fells Point—inside Broadway Hotpot, the newish hotpot spot that’s just a block and a half from the boats and bars of the Thames Street waterfront.
Opened in September of last year by a small group of local businessmen, Broadway Hotpot is a traditional Chinese hotpot restaurant, and thus fills a cauldron-sized hole in the city’s Sichuan dining scene.
Hotpot is a centuries-old cuisine in China, where communal pots of bubbling soup would draw neighborly diners who would cook meats and vegetables in the broth. In the 1930s, hotpot restaurants gained a foothold in Chongqing, where the broth was loaded with chiles and spices.
At Broadway Hotpot, tables are fitted with recessed personal pots controlled by tableside heating mechanisms, like at Korean barbecue joints. Your server will fill the pots with the broth of your choice—pork bone, vegan mushroom, golden chicken, house tomato, herbal, Sichuan peppercorn, “mala” spicy, and more options—then bring trays of raw meats (pork belly, prime rib, lamb) for dipping into the boiling vats.
There are buffet-style counters with all manner of uncooked vegetables, tofu, seafood, and noodles (lotus root, seaweed tied in pretty knots), plus another counter with an exceptional variety of sauces, condiments, herbs, and spices. Imagine a dreamscape Las Vegas buffet crossed with an H Mart.
So you turn your pot of broth to a rolling boil; lower bok choy, enoki mushrooms, tofu skin, and rice cakes into the bubbling broth; dip the cooked bits into bowls of sesame paste, chile crisp, and minced cilantro; and then switch up all the variables and repeat the process.
This is not the more traditional shared hotpot experience of one massive boiling vat—often divided with a yin-yang partition to allow for two kinds of broth. The personal pots cut down on squabbling over control and ingredients, and reduce clutter on the table, often filled with dishes and sauces and drinks. Plus, the interactive aspect of the cuisine itself is communal enough.
This is, it should be said, an all-you-can-eat experience, which is both thrilling and daunting. There are rules and regulations, though, including serious mark-ups for Wagyu and king crab legs. But there are also lunch specials and AYCE skewers.
There are many ways to calibrate the hotpots, not only with the multiple variations of sauce, spice, and ingredients, but with the broth itself. The thing about hotpot restaurants is that, mostly, they don’t have normal kitchens, with chefs working the line. At Broadway Hotpot, there is an upstairs kitchen where giant vats of broth are boiling away, kind of like they are at a ramen place, as our server—a pony-tailed young guy from outside Shanghai—described it.
Once downstairs in the table’s pots, the broth bubbles, cooking meal upon meal, and is then refilled by servers who navigate the aisles carrying huge metal teapots full of more broth. It is a beautiful system, like high tea with better food and a terrific amount of chiles.
And there are bonuses, such as bottomless ice cream in little tubs in a freezer case near the buffet tables. And karaoke (of course there is karaoke) in the form of two rooms you can book, with lights and all the bells and whistles. And there is a full bar, as there should be.
This is all to say that Broadway Hotpot might not look like much—on a busy Fells street near Broadway Market, with signs papering the windows and nondescript advertisements on the sidewalk—but walk inside, and you’d think you were in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley, or even further afield. Bring friends. Stay awhile.