Diving Into a Hot Pot
On when your kids have culinary curiosity and the small wins you take as a parent
Chicken fingers and french fries.
Kids often don’t have adventurous palates, and that’s fine. The world is scary for them because so many things are new. Anything with a weird texture or a flavor that isn’t familiar to them will be thrown across a room. Parents nowadays have less time because it’s expected that 100 percent of the guardians in the household work. Whether it be a single-parent household or one where there are two (or even more), few families are afforded the luxury of one parent or guardian staying at home and focusing their labor on rearing a child for the time when the other one is at a job making money. Raising a child, being a homemaker in general, is labor, unpaid labor at that. In a fair world, the other partner would come home and raise the child when they were done work, but then you get into arguments over whether they get to rest too, and it’s less a disagreement on the effort that both parents put in and more on the demands capitalism puts on people, but this tangent is spiraling into a wholly different conversation.
The point is, in the current state, where both parents or the only parent in the house has to work eight, ten, 12 hours a day, the last thing they’re going to do when they get home is fight a child on what to eat. The less income the household makes, the more stress the parents generally feel. Being poor is hard work and it’s ultimately expensive, in cost and in mental toll. Again, getting off track here. There’s a reason why “chicken fingers and fries,” or pizza, or mac ‘n cheese are often the defaults for children’s palates. To an outsider, it can seem frustrating, but to see kids not explore their palates, but there are always other pressures at play. Do you want to fight with a child to eat roast beef, or would you rather pick a more fruitful battle later on? Parents only have a limited gas tank, and I say this as one who knows from experience.
So is it a triumph when the kids beat the picky eater charges? I don’t think there’s inherent moral value in a child developing their palate at a young age from an absolute standpoint. As a man who enjoys a wide variety of cuisines, spices, and whatnot, I personally take pride in the fact both of my kids eat like little adults. They always have, to be honest. Both my ex-wife and I have done our best to push them towards trying new things, and to their credit, they’ve taken to eating new things like a baby bird to their first flight.
One of the most fruitful developments of this is my son developing a strong taste for various Asian foods. He likes Americanized Chinese takeout and more “authentic”1 dim sum. He’s crazy for sushi and will down a bowl of pho. It’s crazy how much he would prefer various Asian cuisines over “American” stuff, especially as a contrast to how I grew up, where Chinese takeout was a once-a-quarter thing from one restaurant when my godmother would come visit.
Last week, he found out about a hot pot place making their landfall in Philly. It’s not like Philly has a lack of hot pot, but I guess he or his mother saw a story about the Chubby Cattle, a national chain, opening a location locally. The menu is a prix fixe all you can eat thing that includes both sushi, made to order or conveyor belt-style, and the ubiquitous hot pot, which for those who don’t know is like a combination of soup and fondue. We had a “boy’s weekend” this past, well, weekend that included trips to the zoo and to Lancaster County.
He dropped the idea for us to go to the Chubby Cattle, and I had to make a reservation because, hey, it’s Boys Weekend, you do what the boy says, right? Right? They had one open, and we went this past Saturday night. The location in Philly is in the middle of Chinatown, on N. 10th Street between Cherry and Race. If you know anything about the city between Spring Garden and Christian Streets as the North/South boundaries and the rivers on the East and West, parking is a fucking nightmare. We found lot parking, and as it turned out, that would be the only real difficult part of the night.
The restaurant itself was an experience and a half. They sat us down at tables in a center line with heater basins for the pots of soup. To my right was the center column where the conveyor belt offered edamame, salmon carpaccio, and various twofers of the sushi rolls they offered. Ordering, be they the full rolls or the broth and hot pot accoutrements, was done via a tablet on the table.
We both ordered our own rolls, and then we got some vegetables, some taro, and two different kinds of beef for our broths, ribeye and tongue, both wagyu. We both ate voraciously, both from the conveyor belt and from our orders. I finished all my broth, and we finished all our add-ins. Both of us were full at the end of the night, and my son could not stop raving from the first moment he put food in his mouth until even last night when he was over my apartment to hang out.
For me at least, I have a tendency to look at all the areas where I failed as a parent. Came up short. The piercing stab of disappointment gutting you until your kid hugs you and says they love you again. Do parents take times of victory and savor them? Not just the big ones either. Everyone knows how proud we get when our kids take their first steps or talk for the first time or bring home good grades. But what about when you take them out to a restaurant they’ve been dying to try, even if it was just for a few days, and they rave about it non-stop? And it’s a place that’s out of the norm for someone that child’s age, at least from a Western point of view? If he was happy about it, I was over the moon.
It might be silly to pin such value on something as trivial as someone enjoying a meal they’ve had, but I really feel like it’s a sign my ex and I raised him well, to try new things, to push him. It’s not even that I had the idea to go to Chubby Cattle. He was the one who brought up and got excited about it. The fact that he’s so forward and adventurous isn’t a sign that we didn’t fail, because kids who eat chicken and fries all the time aren’t failures. Hell, both my kids love that meal for lunch during the weekend or if we’re out and need something quick. But there is an accomplishment when you can teach them to embrace curiosity and try things at a young age, because if they are like this now, they can expand their palates and imaginations and everything else to limits beyond what their parents thought possible.
And in the end, isn’t that what every parent should want? For their kids to exceed them in every meaningful, beneficial way?
“Authentic” in quotes because who’s to say that the stuff in America, created by immigrants, is less worthy than what’s found in the homeland? Food is food. No shame.