One Great Plate: Kittichai Hot Pot

  KITTICHAI THE ULTRA-SLEEK modern Thai restaurant in Soho’s ultra-sleek 60 Thompson Hotel, is probably the last place I’d expect to see a hoard of avid DIYers. But on Monday nights, the restaurant hosts diners for an evening of do-it-yourself deliciousness: that is, cooking your own dinner over woks of steaming spiced broth.  

Called The Kittichai Hot Pot, this communal meal first announces itself with a cloud of exotic aromas wafting from tableside woks all around the restaurant. Immediately intrigued, my dining companion and I both select the $45-perperson menu, which provided us with unlimited vegetables and proteins to cook in our very own hot-pot (a la cart options are also available). We had barely polished off our green papaya and mango salads when the elaborate production began: First, the waitress poured a traditional fish-based dtom yum broth into our wok; then she added fresh aromatics like lemon grass, ginger, chili, garlic and shallots. Per her suggestion, we threw in some traditional Asian vegetables like bok choy and daikon in order to further enrich the broth’s flavor. The resulting aromas were so mouthwatering that when plates of meat and seafood began arriving at our table, it was tempting to ignore our waitress’s “wait until the broth boils” rule and cook up the plump shrimp and thinly-sliced pork tenderloin immediately.

According to Chef Lulzim Rexhepi, these proteins are quite an upgrade from the fish balls and low-quality cuts of meat served in hot-pot chain restaurants all over Thailand. In fact, the country first adapted the dish as a way to cheaply feed the masses during constant Thai-Burmese warfare hundreds of years ago.

“It was really out of necessity,” explains Rexhepi of the dish’s origins. “And we’re now making it into something beautiful and fun.”

Make that beautiful, fun and insanely tasty. When I dunked a hunk of salmon into the now-bubbling broth, submerging it for the recommended 10 seconds, the resulting bite was perfectly tender and robustly aromatic. So too with a thin slice of hanger steak, which browns to perfection after 10 seconds and pairs perfectly with the provided sukiyaki sauce (sesame oil and soy). The other dipping sauces include a Chinese ginger-scallion blend that goes best with seafood, and a vinegar-based mix of garlic, ginger, sugar and soy.

Unfortunately, not even the best condiment could cover up the fact that I overcooked my serving of squid to the point of almost inedible chewiness. This, of course, is one of the hazards of do-it-yourself dining: You have to focus on seconds-long cooking times, which vary for each protein and, in the case of the squid, leave little room for error. The only ingredients that didn’t require counting were the mussels—they open up when they’re finished—and the vegetables, which soaked up flavor for the 20 minutes.

By the end of our hot-pot experience, I found myself fishing out bits of stray bok choy from the wok, even though I was already satiated. But the show wasn’t over yet: there was our waitress pouring the remaining broth, enhanced by all the ingredients we’d cooked in it, over a bowl of ginger-scallion scented noodles. Yes, the resulting serving was large enough to be a meal in itself, and no, I did not leave room for this unexpected final course. But after all my hard work at the wok, I couldn’t help but to indulge in the final fragrant fruits of my labor.

>>KITTICHAI 60 Thompson St. (betw. Spring & Broome Sts.), 212-219-2000.