Take me to hotpot heaven!
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What? The Sichuan classic
Where? Haidilao Hotpot, Chaoyang 海底捞
Why? Haidilao, which literally means "scooping things from the bottom of the sea", is a Sichuan hotpot chain shop, with 10 branches in Beijing. One of their specialties is fi ne service; while you wait (and usually you will have to), the restaurant offers sweet soybean milk, fruit, chess, and even manicures and free shoe polishing. Haidilao's other selling point is a special sauce with dozens of seasonings to which you're advised to add soup, according to taste. They even have a lamian (pulled noodles) performance, featuring a young man pulling noodles while dancing.
Hours: 24 hours
Address: A2 Baijiazhuang Lu, Chaoyang
District 朝阳区白家庄路甲2号
Tel: 6595-2982
Price for two: 100-150 yuan
Hotpot highs: that secret ingredient is… opium
Some poppy husks in your pot… for the taste, of course. Rumor bubbles up periodically that some restaurants add dried poppy husks (which are used to produce opium) to the broth to guarantee return customers. The husks are picked in autumn before the fruit is sufficiently mature, stripped of their cores and sun-dried. Physical addiction is certainly a novel way of boosting your hospitality trade, but what is the truth here?
Lu Lin, an expert from the Medicine- Reliability Research Center of China, explained that the e. ects of "poppy hotpot" will depend on the diner's levels of sensitivity to the drug.
No scientific experiment has ever been conducted into the consequences of severe indulgence in this hotpot, but "poppy hotpot" sounds like a mixed bag. Lu described its "extraordinary functionality" and e. ects as including increased heart-rate, flushed cheeks and rapid respiration.
Detection is rare, as the poppy shells are finely ground before being dissolved into the mixture so that the taste is masked with strong flavors like garlic or chili. However, if you feel you have ingested something suspicious and are worried about what might happen, there's no need to get too concerned: just drink lots of water and eat some vegetables to aid digestion.
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