Oh, how far the humble hotpot has come.
More than three centuries ago, the Qing dynasty poet Yuan Mei, a renowned foodie of his time, didn't have much good to say about ubiquitous dish. 'In the chafing dish, everything is at the same temperature. The flavour disappears,' he wrote.
If only Yuan could see the hotpot of today, a culinary phenomenon endowed with as many variations and interpretations as any in the history of Chinese cuisine.
But what would Yuan have said of Hong Kong's many hotpot offerings? Huo guo, or 'fire pot', is nominally Chinese, but the city's less-traditional hotpot outlets draw inspiration and ingredients from far-flung places - Thailand's spicy, sweet and sour tom yum kung gets a creamy cappuccino topping, squid balls are stuffed with cheese and black truffles, and frozen tofu and beef are dunked in English oxtail soup. Even the hotpot staples of beef and lamb are now global travellers - marbled wagyu from Japan, Angus beef from Texas, and lamb from Inner Mongolia and New Zealand.
Yuan, an intellectual, would have to agree that hotpot has come a long way - it is said to have appeared as early as the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220) or the Three Kingdoms period (220-280). The first hotpots were used to cook mutton or beef as offerings to the gods and ancestors, and were subsequently consumed, according to tradition.
Lin Hong, a poet of the Southern Song dynasty, about 1,000 years later, raved about a hotpot meal of rabbit cooked in water, wine, soy sauce and pepper in his book, Simple Foods of the Mountain Folk.
But hotpot really arrived during the Qing dynasty, when it moved from the peasant table to the imperial banquet, reaching the status of qian sou yan, or 'thousand elders banquet', during the Kangxi and Qianlong eras. In the intervening centuries, hotpot took on regional flavours: Beijing's preoccupation with mutton, Sichuan's numbing love of huajiao, its namesake peppercorn, and the clear, soothing seafood hotpots of Southern China.
