When the popular Asian dish of meat and vegetables dipped in hot broth is reenvisioned as a $500 meal in Las Vegas, it may be time to try it at home.
By Betty Hallock
January 27, 2010
What's the most expensive dinner in America? An omakase meal of pristine, perfectly sliced sushi, the fish flown in from Tsukiji market in Tokyo and prepared for you personally by a Yoda-equivalent sushi master? Or maybe a 12-course tasting menu from a Michelin three-star French chef, each plate a culmination of several components made by an army of kitchen staff? Not exactly. It's most likely $500-per-person Japanese hot pot -- yes, hot pot.
A popular style of Asian home cooking, hot pot comes from a nearly 1,000-year-old culinary tradition of dipping sliced meat or seafood and vegetables into bubbling broth, supposedly à la Genghis Khan. A communal dish cooked and shared at the dining table, it's soul food, great for cold weather and for feeding an intimate group (emphasis on the intimate -- you are, after all, eating from the same pot).
Lately, though, the humble hot pot doesn't seem so humble. Masayoshi Takayama, the sushi chef whose New York restaurant Masa might be the epitome of rarefied Japanese dining in the U.S., has taken it to Las Vegas. At Shaboo, the restaurant he just opened there, his version of shabu-shabu -- traditionally paper-thin slices of beef quickly poached with vegetables in a water-based broth -- will cost you more than the recent price of an All Nippon Airways round-trip flight to Tokyo.
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