Taiwanese shabu-shabu

Have you ever had shabu-shabu in Japan? It’s a bit like fondue—I guess this is a pretty global form of food. You have a boiling pot of soup broth into which you dip veggies and meat to cook them, then you have various dipping sauces to eat them with. They have something similar in Taiwan, and my friends wanted to show it to me.

Of course, we were in Taichung, and they didn’t know a particular place to go, so we just drove around the downtown until we found such a restaurant. It took 30 minutes, but they were very determined. I’m glad we stuck with the quest because it turned out to be lots of fun.

It was a casual, family-style restaurant, full of kids and kind of cafeteria-like. The tables are set with holes into which the pots of soup are placed, and there’s a dial at each place to control the temperature. We got standard broth, but there are a couple other types too. Then, like a cafeteria, there is a self-service bar where you go and heap your plate with things to cook. There are fresh veggies like lettuce, clover leaf, broccoli, onions, corn, and carrots. And then there are a zillion flash-frozen selections—they seem to have been dipped in liquid nitrogen or something because they are really still quite fresh, but are completely solidified so that they can stay safe at the self-service bar all evening. The frozen choices were endless (and some were unidentifiable to me): crab, shrimp, slices of beef, pork meatballs, potstickers, balls of taro root, dumplings, scrambled egg with fish bits in it, tofu cubes, rolls of fish paste with vegetables.

Mavis picked out something dark that looked like a sesame cake. I asked what it was, and she smiled and said it was rice with “brad.” Brad? She repeated it several times, grinning all the while, and it finally dawned on me that she was saying blood. It was a rice patty held together with congealed cow’s blood. I didn’t take one, but did consent to having a taste of hers when she cooked it. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. It clearly had some other taste to it besides rice, but it didn’t have the oxidized-iron taste that is usually associated with blood. It was more just an added richness to the rice. I’m not sure how it held together in the boiling soup, but it did; maybe there was some other ingredient as a binder also.

The food cooked in the soup in about a minute, and then you pulled it out and put it in your eating bowl. Each piece could be dipped in a rich beef-onion sauce that added a lot of nice flavor. It was easy to go back to the bar multiple times to try different things.

There was another section of the cafeteria with self-service noodles, dim sum (meatballs in rice paper, a specialty of Hong Kong), fruit, and dessert. They had various cakes and big drums of ice cream, where you could scoop your own cone. I marveled at how that was such a nice, practical way to do it, but it would probably violate health codes in the US.

I had filled up on the food, but still wanted to satisfy an ice cream craving, so I got a little bit of vanilla. When I brought it back to the table, they all gawked at me in horror—how could I eat ice cream when I was cold? I had forgotten that Asians have a very strong association of particular foods with the quality of the body. Modern Westerners think on immediate terms: if you are hot, drink a cold beer or soda, or have a sundae. It will help while you’re eating it, but once it’s been melted by your body heat, the effect is over. Asians, like Westerners of many hundred years ago (and Greeks too), have a different view. They see the food as integrating with the body, so that eating lots of cold foods will tend to make the body grow cold over time, while the opposite is true for warm foods. Spicy foods incite a hot temper, etc.

Now it is true that I eat ice cream a lot, and I do get cold a lot, so perhaps we shouldn’t sneeze at the association. And there is no doubt that our food is used to build our body, so why wouldn’t some of its character seep into the person? On the other hand, the people I know who are consistently too hot tend to try to combat this by drinking lots of cold drinks. How come they don’t find long-term relief?

Anyway, I enjoyed my ice cream despite their tut-tut looks. And what a fun restaurant! By the time we left, there was a line stretching out the door of people waiting for a table. It was a good thing we had arrived at 6 pm rather than 7 pm.