#28 Hot Pot & BBQ

Another visit for Tony to Xuzhou this week. For the time being, I plan to travel to Xuzhou every other week for the next several months to stay in touch with motor grader production and new product issues at Caterpillar Xuzhou Ltd (CXL).

This week I travelled with my colleagues Bill and Stanley. Stanley is a former Xuzhou resident and he treated us to a Chinese restaurant experience called "Hot Pot". Hot Pot is a type of restaurant where you cook the food yourself in a pot of boiling water (or oil) in the center of the dining table. The pot contains an outer pot with a harmless tomato-based broth and an inner pot with a smoking hot and spicy liquid which makes hot buffalo wings seem like baby formula.

Uncooked food is brought to the table on a cart. The diners as Bill and Stanley demonstrate above, drop thinly sliced food items of their choosing into one of the two pots and allow them to cook in the boiling fluids. The restaurant was not very clean, but at least we could oversee sterilization of all food and utensils by exposure to the hot pot. The food tasted quite good and the resulting broth in the outer pot was also quite tasty - like Russian borsch soup according to Bill.

Stanley and I stayed on for the weekend so we could participate in a farewell Brazilian barbeque at the Caterpillar expat compound in Xuzhou. Our friend and colleague, Joao, is leaving after a year and a half in China to return to his native Brazil. Joao is renowned at CXL for his love of the Brazilian BBQ as well as his love of Bing Pi Jiu (Chinese for "cold beer"). Shown in the second picture, he is stoking the fire during the evening portion of the BBQ which started at 1 PM and lasted past midnight. The Brazilians apparently grill everything and anything. In the scene above Joao is grilling steaks with rock salt, garlic bread, and bananas.

I posted a collection of pictures from the weekend at Snapfish. Click HERE if you wish to see them.