- [Amelie] Originally we wanted to bring
dry pot here and kind of let the world know
Chinese cuisine is not just Sichuan, not just
kung pao chicken. Look at this one thing:
It's one dish, but it's so great,
and you don't know about it yet.
But it turns out we are also introducing
this to Chinese as well. That was really satisfying to see.
Dry pot is considered a new invention in China.
It became popular in the '90s and was originated in
a small city next to Chengdu.
Being a relatively new dish, if you ask our parents,
not everybody knows about what dry pot is.
A lot of my generation do know about dry pot.
I was in Beijing, and it was everywhere.
So when I left for college, it was just kind of sad
to not be able to have it on a weekly basis.
I think the reason that dry pot was popularized
in certain cities, especially big cities,
is because it's kind of like the salad bars
here in New York. You can have all the ingredients
that you want. You can customize your own dry pot.
You can have three dry pots with 30 different ingredients.
You can share it with 10 people, 12 people.
In our particular dry pot, we have three different sauces.
The base sauce is a mixture of different spices,
so it's not hot by itself, but we do use chili oil
and chili flake and chili powder.
A lot of the spices are herbal remedies,
and we only do a small amount of certain spices,
because they're so pungent so it makes a big difference.
- We have more than 70 ingredients in our menu.
- [Amelie] You pick your own ingredients from
sliced beef, to lamb, to fish filets.
[Meng] Rooster's testicle, frog--
[Amelie] You can have your vegetables,
Chinese cabbage, and your soy product,
and everything is mixed together and wok-fried,
and it is served in a bamboo bowl.
There's so many different possibilities for dry pot.
- If a person has a first time come here
I would recommend one or two meat,
and some seafood. Maybe two vegetables --
just a mix of everything.
- [Amelie] Liangfen is mung bean noodles
and the literal translation from Chinese is
"sadness mung bean noodle." The story goes,
back then when people were eating this dish,
which is made with mung bean noodle
soaked in a mixture of hot sauce, chili oil,
a little bit of vinegar, salt, a little bit of sugar.
It's so good that people start crying.
The other version is that because it's so hot,
then people start crying.
The noodle itself is kinda like a jelly texture.
A very, very subtle green bean-y taste.
But, because it's a little bit slippery,
it takes up some of the sauce and you eat it like that.
So it's kind of refreshing, too.
We just played around with the name
and called it Happy Tears.
- So the thousand-year egg is a traditional way
to make the chicken egg. We mix them with
ash, salt, cook lime, for several weeks to several months,
depending on the process.
After several weeks, [the] egg will become a little
gray. Otherwise, it will become brown.
So it's very delicious.
- [Amelie] The sauce is like a vinegar-y,
soy sauce mixture. We use tiger peppers,
and we deep-fry the peppers. The pepper is
actually really, really hot. The egg kind of cuts
the hotness of the pepper, too.
- [Meng] It's a dish relates to our childhood.
- [Amelie] We wanted to do something
that we personally like. Focus on something more specific
rather than on a wider range of Sichuan dishes.
Because there is a lot of
Sichuan restaurants in New York City already,
and it's kind of difficult to stand out.
Dry pot itself, it can be anything that you want.
So it's very simple, but there's a lot of possibilities.