One of the best parts of travelling is undoubtedly the food and trying new cuisines. Being such a large country China has a particularly rich array of options to choose from, with almost all regions being represented in Beijing and numerous local variants. On the evening after my day wandering through the north of the city I went for hot pot at Xiabu Xiabu (a popular restaurant chain) in Wangfujing.
Here you choose from a selection of vegetables, meats and seafood to cook in your own individual hot pot containing stock of varying degrees of spiciness. Once cooked you usually dip the food in sesame sauce before eating with a bowl of rice. It’s not the first time I’ve had hot pot, but this was a slightly different variant known as Shabu-shabu (hence the name of the place). Delicious!
I’ve been to this place and thank you so much for the beautiful pictures! It makes me sad that I have no idea when is the next time I’ll go back when I see pictures of cuisine like this. Any chance you can buy a pack (i saw that they just rip open a bag) of their sesame sauce off of them and send it over to me? I would gladly pay for it!
Hi Fatima, glad you like the pics – don’t they sell sesame sauce wherever you area? It should be quite commonly available I think…
They don’t sell the type of sauce that’s already made and ready. They sell straight ground sesame “sauce” which is this cement like mixture (think of peanut butter… but it could bend/break the utensil you try to stir the jar with). The difference is sort of like tomato paste vs. ketchup. If anyone can get a hand on that bag and mail it out to me, I’d pay top dollar for it.
This restaurant looks really nice. I’m going to beijing this christmas and i’d like to try hotpot. Do you have the xiabu xiabu’s location somewhere on googlemaps?
Hi Hana – you can find these types of restaurants all over the place. Just look out for the tables with big pots in the middle 🙂
This particular place is Wangfujing and can be found in the food court underneath the McDonalds there. I don’t remember exactly but it shouldn’t be too hard to find.
There’s another near Tsinghua University… 🙂
The Wangfujing location is in the large mall under the Hyatt. It’s at the end closest to Wangfujing on the lower level of the mall. . You have to go into the food court area and down an escalator to an even lower level where it’s tucked away