As guests trickled into Jenna Zhang and Irene Kim’s apartment in Astoria, Queens, on a recent Saturday evening, no one needed an explanation for the array of raw ingredients before them — the marbled sliced meats; fish tofu and rolled, fried skins; napa cabbage; plump pink rice cakes; and ramen noodles.
Electronic dance music hummed in the background, as friends reminisced, discussed plans and asked the all-important question: “How are you? It’s been so long.” They were gathering early for a Lunar New Year party, feasting on hot pot, a dish that young members of the Chinese diaspora, and increasingly Asian Americans at large, have embraced as celebratory.
In China, Lunar New Year, which begins on Saturday, is a time of intense travel and the only time of year many can make it home. For those living abroad, making a trip can be impossible, whether because of finances or time. And many people, less traditional than their parents, forgo the traditional homegoing altogether.
Wherever the holiday is celebrated, hot pot offers a chance for loved ones and chosen family alike to gather close over the same steaming bowl, lowering ingredients into the communal broth for all to grab, and assembling servings for one another. It’s both meal and act, fostering intimacy and nostalgia. (Hot pot is a staple of Chinese home cooking, a dinner shared among family members, with variations all over Asia.)
For Ms. Zhang, her parents and six siblings, Lunar New Year was the only holiday they celebrated — “that was the only time, realistically, that we were all together,” she said — and hot pot was always on the table.
But the dish was less familiar to Ms. Kim, who is Korean American and was introduced to hot pot by friends like Ms. Zhang. (Best friends turned roommates, the two women, both 23, have a popular TikTok account dedicated to the dinners they cook for each other every night.)
“I’ve come to really love it,” Ms. Kim said. “And now every time we celebrate something, we have hot pot.”
Tansy Huang, 22, who works at Pike Place Market in Seattle, said his mother would always make hot pot for the family when the weather turned cold. “Hot pot was a way of showing care for each other and keeping ourselves warm and healthy,” he said.
Unlike traditional Lunar New Year dishes like dumplings and whole fish, hot pot is easy to make — a plus for young people who may not have the space or experience to cook multiple dishes. You simply wash and prepare the ingredients, and your guests will do the rest.
Zoey Gong, 27, a food therapist and chef specializing in traditional Chinese medicine, moved to the United States from China 11 years ago, and, like many of her friends, doesn’t have family here. She hosted five hot pot parties last year, ringing in her birthday and Thanksgiving with the dish.
“It’s a lot of work to cook a traditional new-year meal, with fish and everything,” she said, “so it’s a lot easier to use hot pot to celebrate.”
Ms. Zhang and Ms. Kim, who used to cook the dish on the stovetop, only recently bought a traditional hot pot, split into a yin-yang shape for separate broths. (Many young cooks, not quite ready to invest in the specific appliance, improvise, even using multicookers.)
For the roommates’ dinner last week, it was filled with savory tomato broth, made from a packaged stock to which Jenna added her own mix of seasonings “just in case.” To one half of the pot, she added some málà broth — numbing-spicy and bright red — that is the trademark of Sichuan-style hot pot. A second pot bubbled away at another table, for those who didn’t prefer spice.
Michelle King, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said hot pot’s main appeal is how conducive it is to gathering. “It’s written into the way you eat,” she said, “the feeling of celebration and communion.”
You can pick and choose ingredients as you please, but there are a few requirements: You should be able to ladle out someone’s stray noodle and guide it back onto their plate. You shouldn’t mind bumping your chopsticks, laden with raw meat, with someone else’s in the pot. You should be game to reach across the table and slide in the last of the leafy greens, and then “dumpster dive,” as Ms. Kim calls it, for any last bits of meat swimming in a now-thick broth. And you should linger — talking, cooking, eating — as long as the meal requires.
“You don’t have to be family to do it,” Ms. King said. But, she added, “You can’t do it alone. You have to do hot pot with other people.”
