Taiwanese Hot Pot

Taiwan has quite a number of Indians living here, working in the computer industry. I often see them out and about, the women wearing beautiful saris and their husbands in standard office dress. Two of my little students (Dhwani and Khyati) were Indian, from Gujarat. It must be difficult to be a Hindu in Taipei though, because almost all the commonly available food has meat in it. In fact, the local English paper recently ran an expose on ostensibly vegetarian food, to discover that over 60% of it contained some sort of meat product. Ooops!

Last night I went out to eat with my boss and co-workers from Uncle Jason School. Jason (the Chinese boss) took us out to a Mongolian hot pot restaurant. Hot pot restaurants are incredibly popular here. The idea is that in the center of the table boils a big pot of water. You order various uncooked foods, such as meat, vegetables, tofu, duck blood, quail eggs, etc., and then boil them yourself in the pot, removing them when you are ready to eat. The whole process is very slow, so that dinner typically takes at least two hours to complete. I don't usually like hot pot, because when I go out to eat, I want them to cook my food, but this restaurant was actually really good. The water was heavily spiced, with cumin, chili peppers, garlic and various Chinese spices which are supposed to have medicinal qualities. Supposedly this is the same recipe used by the Mongolian emperors many years ago. My boss also broke out the (practically obligatory) expensive, imported whiskey. I had to drink it even though I dislike whiskey, as he kept telling me, "You have to catch up!" This is what a polite Chinese host does.

Whiskey and scotch have some sort of very powerful snob appeal to the Chinese. B and I are friends with a Chinese family here, of a mother, father, son and daughter, whom we visit every week. They have several imported bottles of whiskey, which they keep around just for "face", that famous Chinese concept.