IPot (愛鍋)

When you hear the name IPot, what sort of imagery does the name elicit? I had thought it was some new-fangled cooking vessel cashing in on the popularity of one fruit-named company until I came across this tweet from Gourmet Forager. It is more likely a portmanteau of individual + pot, but the “i” also happens to be a homophone for “ai” – the first character of the restaurant’s name in Chinese, meaning love, and the name of the place being “love (hot)pot”.

And love hotpot you must, as this restaurant specialises in the winter warmer that is cooking up stuff in boiling soup. The novelty is not only in the individual pots, but also the individual burners built into the table forming a giant induction cooktop surface. Hotpot ingredients are ordered à la carte, arrive reassuringly fresh and prove to be good value unless you splash out on the wagyu. Soup bases are charged per pot, and dipping sauces are charged per head but you can help yourself to as much as you like from a self-serve area at the front of the store. Various meatballs and dumplings aside, it’s the cuttlefish “noodles” which are lots of fun – essentially cuttlefish paste in a piping bag which you get to squeeze into your pot of soup for instant, springy strands of cuttlefish!

The odd part of IPot is its novelty of cooking your own food, in your own pot. While this is a great option for smaller dining groups of 2 or 3, as you really wouldn’t go to the trouble of doing so yourself at home, or at restaurants which offer only massive pots, it feels antisocial to have your face buried in your individual pot and non-conducive to table conversation. Part of the fun of hotpot is throwing in handfuls of food for yourself as well as others, fishing for it later, and talking across the rising steam. Dining is as much about the company, conversation and atmosphere as it is the food, and I guess I’m so used to hotpot being a communal activity.

The induction cooktop does a great job of heating up quickly, with surrounding areas staying touch cool, but has the unusual quality of continually heating up and cooling down assumedly to maintain the heat setting selected. Nonetheless, this means very little time is spent waiting for your soup to reboil and the hotpot experience is a continuous one to warm the cockles of your heart.

So, just a short post for now, posts about Europe (and, err, Hong Kong) will resume soon. Have a great weekend!

IPot (愛鍋)

Shop 4, 4-10 Goulburn St (cnr Dixon St), Sydney NSW

Tel: (02) 8355 3188

Opening Hours:  7 days  11:30am-3pm (lunch)

                                    5:30pm-11:30pm (dinner)

happy eating!