Hot Hot Chinese, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Soup kitchen

Review published on 02/03/2009 © Sunday Herald

Hot Hot Chinese is one of a new wave of authentic Chinese restaurants turning up in our cities. I say Chinese, but there's also a Korean connection here, as witnessed by the prominence on the lunchtime menu of kimchee, Korea's favourite condiment of fermented cabbage, spiced up with chilli. There's no menu in the window - transparency isn't a strong point - but its steaminess provides a clue to what's on offer, that traditional, popular Chinese meal, the "steamboat" or hot pot.

If you want a break from cooking, then the evening hot pot isn't for you because it's a DIY feast. The nearest Western equivalent is the Swiss fondue, but it's not half as varied or interesting. The menu isn't hugely informative but we were served by a smiley, patient and helpful young man who explained the drill. You choose a style of clear, thin soup, which is kept bubbling hot on a tabletop electric stove and a string of ingredients is brought to you: fish, all kinds of meat, vegetables, fungi, noodles. These come with three condiments to add to your taste: minced garlic in sesame oil, a chilli sauce and a thick, peanuty paste. You simply say if there are any items on the list that you don't want, and everything else is brought to you. Eat as much as you want, with limitless top-ups on demand, all for £12.50 a head.

We went for the formula known in China as "yuanyang" or "yinyang", which translates as "double taste". The soup pot is divided down the middle. In one half bubbles a mild, pale fish consommé flavoured with a plump, skin-on white fish fillet and spring onions, in the other, the classic Sichuan-style soup.

"Fiery" doesn't quite do justice to this latter northern Chinese speciality. Terracotta-red and oily (it's meant to be like that), it brims with lethally hot dried chillis, what looks like several bulbs of garlic, and fistfuls of Sichuan peppercorns. These peppercorns have a unique taste - a little like medicinal mandarin peel mixed with black peppercorn - but their defining characteristic is that they have a slightly tingling, anaesthetising effect on the tongue. Chinese people call it "mala", which means numb and spicy.

The ingredients for cooking arrive at the table with instructions about timing. Most items need only a two-minute bubble, some five minutes, a couple need 10. You add them to the pot and then fish them out with a little wire strainer. The soup becomes ever more savoury as each ingredient imparts its flavour.

What didn't we have? My favourites were the vegetables: leafy Chinese greens, cabbage, potatoes and white radish. The whole fresh, ungutted, baby squid were good too and frozen scallops surprisingly delicious. Tofu and I have never got on - you get a silky one and a crumbly one at Hot Hot - and I remain immune to the charms of wood ear fungus, though my dining partner thought they were fab. Thumbs up for cellophane or glass thread noodles which form an addictively slippy cascade and the thick, grey, flat buckwheat noodles. Tiger prawns were as tasteless as always. I confess that we studiously ignored something that looked like Spam but the other meats, which come wafer-thin and raw, were interesting, with the lamb pipping the beef and pork. I was the only one brave enough to try out the ribbons of beef tripe, which were actually quite likeable, especially when bathed in the red-hot aromatic depths of the Sichuan soup. The two-soup thing is a good idea. You can take a break from the hot and spicy and seek refuge in the mildly fishy.

Hot Hot serves a genuine, if challenging, experience. The next time I visit, I'll follow these rules: 1. Allow what you've fished out to cool so that you don't burn your tongue.

2. Don't overdo the Sichuan soup at the beginning so you can taste the rest.

3. Cook small things in the wire ladle or you'll be chasing them like a frustrated angler.

4. Don't chuck everything in at once, so you can work out what's what. On second thoughts, please yourself whether you go for rolling chaos or a more orderly progression.

Either way, it's fascinating.