Hot pot is an incredibly wholesome experience centered around the communal cooking (and eating) of a soup. You gather up a few friends, get seated around a massive pot of a boiling broth, and dunk every raw morsel the servers bring you. But, as anyone who loves hot pot will tell you, the bill adds up quickly. And the workaround, apparently, is to sneak your own food in and dunk that shit before the servers see it.
At least that’s what a bunch of people over in China are doing these days. In hot pot places like Hai Di Lao and Imperial Treasure, patrons are sneaking their own raw ingredients inside. And it’s not just modest amounts of vegetables, either—it’s whole-ass chickens and raw fish. Weirdly, this has become something of a viral trend in China, with people recording their raw ingredient dunking for internet clout.
Here’s a video compilation from a Vietnamese Facebook group:
Obviously, some of these snuck-in ingredients are okay. Bok choy, cilantro, noodles and watercress? Sure. But an entire chicken? An actual uncooked fillet of fish? Plus, these kids are smuggling the goods via personal bags and purses, which gives random lint balls, receipts, and hair the opportunity to glue onto fleshy raw meat before their spicy broth bath. Gross.
[via Asia One]