Shabu Shabu, plus two
Allston restaurants are latest to join hot-pot craze
Sometimes the world divides into camps. Democrat or Republican. Chocolate or vanilla. Boxers or briefs. Shabu shabu is like that. You're either the kind of person who enjoys cooking your own dinner in a bubbling pot at your table, or you're the kind who believes that the restaurant experience was designed precisely to avoid having to cook, and that this particular setup is rather a travesty. Like Democrats and Republicans, the two sides can have a hard time understanding each other.
I love shabu shabu. I cannot comprehend what there is not to love. It combines the fun of fondue with the flavors of Japan, China, and Korea. (Though different countries have slightly different hot-pot styles, in Boston the idioms tend to blur.) It's interactive. It's great for kids, it's great for dates. It's healthy, unless you're watching your sodium intake. There is something for every taste - you can eat light, springy fish paste and tofu puffs and beef tongue in a spicy, numbing Sichuan broth, or you can have rib eye and chicken and mixed vegetables in bouillon. It's a meal that virtually requires you drink a certain amount of beer. Not the interesting, microbrew kind, but a pale yellow varietal such as Sapporo or Tsingtao with which you can slake your thirst with great gusto. The ingredients are almost always of high quality - beautiful scarlet rolls of paper-thin beef, ultra-fresh seafood - and the service is friendly and helpful. It has to be, as shabu shabu restaurants are filled with confused first-timers juggling ladles and chopsticks and trying to figure out just how long it really takes an eel ball to cook.
Here is how shabu shabu works: You choose the meat, seafood, and vegetables you want, as well as one or two kinds of broth. There will be a complimentary house broth plus several other options you pay a few dollars for. A server brings you the ingredients; the soup goes on an electric burner or other heat source. You can sit at a table and share a large pot divided down the middle to accommodate two broths, or sit at the counter and cook in individual, smaller pots. When the broth is at a rolling boil, you pick up thin slices of meat and swish them in it with your chopsticks ("shabu shabu" means "swish swish"), or plunk in longer-cooking ingredients such as corn and mushrooms, then fish them out later. Eat as you go, dunking bites into different sauces and slurping up bits of soup. The more things you cook in it, the better the broth gets. When everything else is gone, in go noodles or rice, the beneficiaries of the most flavorful soup at the end.
It seems people in the Boston area largely fall into the pro camp. We're in the midst of a bit of a shabu shabu craze. With two new places opening in the last few months, there are now six separate, often rather cavernous restaurants devoted to hot pot. (Others offer it as part of larger menus.) The two newcomers - Shabu-Zen, a second branch of the Chinatown location of the same name, and Shabu Shabu Toki - opened within a few months of each other on opposite sides of Brighton Avenue in Allston. They have a lot in common. Both places are big enough to seat a Mongol horde - shabu shabu is said to have originated with Genghis Khan's troops; according to some accounts, the soldiers, on the march, cooked in their own helmets. The restaurants have comparable price points and similar food. And both are often crowded, though Shabu-Zen is more consistently so at odd times on weeknights. (Another benefit of shabu shabu places is that many are open late - Kaze in Chinatown shuts down at 1 a.m. on weeknights, 2 a.m. on weekends.)
Shabu Shabu Toki places more emphasis on style. There are groovy, wavy-patterned silver panels on the walls, and a swath of red paint unfurls like a giant tongue up a wall and across the ceiling. The menu, too, has style. In addition to the usual short rib and seafood platters, it offers premium black pork belly, Long Island duck, and wagyu beef. You can get standard udon, but also Inaniwa udon - premium noodles imported from Japan. In addition to its namesake dish, Shabu Shabu Toki specializes in kushiyaki, meat, seafood, and vegetables grilled on skewers. And there's sushi - Toru Oga, of Oga's in Natick and Sushi-Teq, is involved in the project.
Shabu-Zen is a bit less designed, though it does have a rock and sand garden that a sign sadly forbids you to mess with. It also has a parking lot in back, and a giant movie screen on which CNN was projected on a recent night. A group of six big guys sat at the shabu shabu counter, pillaging the kitchen and amusingly attempting to woo their waitress. "Do a shot of sake with us!" they hollered between bites of kimchee, dumplings, and every meat known to man. She demurred, perhaps confused by the concept of sake shots.
Shabu Shabu Toki has broths you're less likely to see at other places - Japanese style, tonkotsu (pork bone) miso, soy milk, and one based on Korean chili paste. Its garnishes mix things up, too. In addition to the usual garlic, scallions, and hot pepper, the restaurant serves yuzu kosho - a distinctive citrus, salt, and pepper paste - and a bright red pepper and daikon mixture. The restaurant's emphasis is slightly more Japanese than at other local shabu shabu joints.
Shabu Shabu Toki's broths are very good, but Shabu-Zen's are better. The varieties are ones you're more likely to see elsewhere: Chinese herbal, Chinese spicy, tom yum, kimchee. They're simply more flavorful than Toki's. Even the house broth, just kombu and water, has a deep smokiness to it. And the spicy is truly spicy, given richness by the bones floating in the pot.
Rivaling Shabu-Zen for best broth in town is Little Q Hot Pot in Quincy. It and the Chinatown branch of Shabu-Zen seem the most family-oriented of the bunch: Several generations are often gathered together around one pot. Little Q's soups are chock-full of floating herbs and aromatics - wolfberries, chilies, ginseng. The Mongolian veggie and mala (spicy) broths may just be cures for the common cold, for completely different reasons. The veggie will soothe the germs into complacency; the mala will eject them by making you sweat. The diners at Little Q are always flushed, peeling off layers of clothing.
In Chinatown, you'll find the original branch of Shabu-Zen, which has the same menu as its Allston sibling, and Kaze. This two-story shabu shabu palace has slightly more upscale decor, and slightly saltier broth. Both places are always hopping. On a Saturday night, the waits can be long.
And in Brookline, there's Shabu Village. The people here are lovely, though the seafood and broth are better elsewhere.
If I had to rank these restaurants, based purely on shabu shabu, this would be my order: 6. Shabu Village; 5. Shabu Shabu Toki; 4. Kaze; 3. Little Q Hot Pot; 2. Shabu-Zen Allston; 1. Shabu-Zen Chinatown. If I was craving sushi, the order might change. Rankings aren't really necessary here. The difference between a 5 and a 1 is not great. Almost all of these restaurants score. Swish!
Devra First can be reached at dfirst@globe.com 