Bay Area Eats: Wuji Ma La Hot Pot
Wei La hot pot, spice level 0.5.
On a chill winter night, there may be no better food in the world than hot pot. You sit, you order, and within minutes, a cauldron of flavorful broth is brought to your table, along with generous platters of meats, innards, seafood, and vegetables. The pot sits on a low flame, bubbling merrily throughout the meal, and you get to decide how and when you'd like your food - tossing in some napa cabbage first so it simmers over the course of the meal to a melt-in-the-mouth tenderness, sliding a plate of shrimp in so the broth takes on a delicious, oceanic brineyness, and giving some thinly-sliced lamb a quick, five-second swish in the broth before dipping in hot sauce enroute to your mouth.
Some people believe the whole point of hot pot is the communal dining experience - everybody shares a pot placed in the middle of the table and much merriment ensues. Picky eaters and germ-a-phobes will be relieved to know that at Wuji, you get a mini cauldron to yourself. Crucially, this means you get to specify how spicy you'd like your broth to be on a scale from 0.5 to 5 - which is great because while some people like it mouth-numbingly hot, others (me) like to be able to taste their food. And if you're thinking "Bah, I can take the heat," allow me to introduce the Taiwanese concept of Ma La. Ma means "to numb" and this is achieved by the use of Szechuan peppercorns. Szechuan peppers are not spicy in the way that chile peppers are spicy - they do not cause a burning sensation in your mouth. Rather, they leave a tingly numbness on your lips and tongue. La means "spicy" - chile pepper spicy - and here, is brought about by the liberal use of chile oil.
Ma La hot pot, spice level 3.
Order a Wei La pot and you will get spice level 0.5 - which, I assure you, is plenty spicy. Specify a spice level of 2, and you'll find yourself reaching for your friends' water glasses. Specify a spice level of 3, and this is what you get: a pot so drenched in chile oil that you can barely make out the broth beneath. Every morsel of food that you dip in and pick out gets a thorough coating of the hot stuff, and you will be begging the waiter for milk to quench the fire.
The broth at Wuji is rich and flavorful, milky with bone marrow (not coconut milk as some Yelpers strangely claim) and animal goodness. You pick from a variety of meats (lamb, beef, chicken, shrimp, beef tendon, stewed tripe, pig intestines, fishballs) and non-meats (shrooms, tofu, corn, leafy greens, glass noodles). What impressed me about Wuji was their use of non-treated, head-on shrimp. If this makes no sense to you, I feel compelled to share: almost all shrimp in the US have been treated with phosphates. This directly affects the way they taste and how much they cost. When shrimp are treated, they are leached of their natural sweetness and gain a significant percentage of their final selling weight - bad news for consumers who suffer the double whammy of having to pay more for an artificially heavier and inferior tasting product, good news for sellers who don't care.
If you have ever bought headless shrimp, then you have most definitely encountered the treated variety. This is because shrimp with their heads intact gain only one percent of their body weight when treated - too skimpy a gain for the shrimp processing people to bother treating them. Another check would be to look for signs of a healthy red blush on the shrimp heads - treated shrimp have no such coyness.
At Wuji, the shrimp taste sweetly of the ocean. Ringing in at a grand total of $14 for their priciest pot, you're not going to get Kobe beef. But what you do get is fresh and way more than decent for the price. The broth is delicious (especially by the end of the meal), and you know that an eatery that cares enough to source and serve untreated shrimp isn't cutting corners.
Beware: the eatery is cash-only and probably won't seat more than 25 diners. View their menu here.
Wuji Mala House
1715 Lundy Ave #100, San Jose CA 95131
408-441-0822
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10 Comments:
Does the restaurant itself not hold more than 25 people, or will they not seat a party of more than 25?
DanielJ at 11:56AM on 01/19/09
mmMmmm How I love hotpot! The perfect solution to a cold winter's day fa sho!
Have you tried Little Fat Sheep Mongolian Hotpot & BBQ? If so, how does that restaurant chain compare to Wuji Ma La?
avocadoboba at 12:44PM on 01/19/09
Not to be too technical, but Ma La is a Szechuanese concept, introduced to Taiwan when the KMT and some 2 million refugees (with a large Szechuan contigent) arrived there in 1949.
practicallydone at 1:31PM on 01/19/09
DanielJ: It's a tiny cubbyhole of a restaurant -- I doubt it could fit more than 25 people.
onedaylingers at 2:23PM on 01/19/09
avocadoboba: I have tried Little Fat Sheep and did not enjoy my meal. It's incredibly pricey for what you get ($130 for four people, including tip, no drinks). The tiger prawns they serve are treated, while the regular prawns (head-on) are not fresh. It may be a matter of personal preference, but their broth is Chinese herb based with plenty of coriander/cilantro. If you're sensitive to these herbs, the soup will taste unpleasantly soapy to you. I'm Chinese and love cilantro, but even this was too much for me.
onedaylingers at 2:30PM on 01/19/09
practicallydone: how right you are =) thanks for pointing it out.
onedaylingers at 2:37PM on 01/19/09
i had hotpot this weekend at home. i prefer eating hotpot at home because it's more fun, comfy, you can eat as long as you want, eat whatever you like and it is way cheaper. the 3 of us ate $50 worth of food in 4 hours. We ate so much! i was so suprise there are so many different types of fish balls and dumplings to choose from at the asian supermarket.
Melmelmeow at 7:27PM on 01/19/09
;_; I was hoping for a recipe too.
Zelnox at 9:21PM on 01/19/09
Melmelmeow: My family have the worst luck with hotpots. We only get around to using our (electric) hotpot several times a year, and these things spoil if you don't use them regularly. We were replacing ours every year for a while before we gave up. Hotpot at home is the best though -- you get to select the best ingredients for much less, and everyone is free to be at their rowdy best =) We especially like tossing in Korean kimchi dumplings.
onedaylingers at 8:04AM on 01/20/09
Zelnox: If you're keen on a Ma La version, you can find packs of prepared stock bases in Chinese grocery stores -- just add water. If you want to make the broth from scratch, here are a couple of recipes:
simple:
http://www.cooking.com/Recipes-And-More/RecDetail.aspx?rid=1177
http://www.penangfaces.chanlilian.net/steam-boat/
involved:
http://www.abc.net.au/kyliekwong/recipes/s952592.htm
http://kuali.com/recipes/viewrecipe.asp?r=672
have fun!
onedaylingers at 8:15AM on 01/20/09