A Hot Pot from Chong Qing in Cyrildene
Homemade sauces, ridiculously good beef noodles and a family that takes feeding you seriously. Nick Hamman pulls up a chair at one of Johannesburg’s longstanding hotpot restaurants.
Michael Wang takes hotpot on holiday.
I’m trying to understand the logistics of this when he explains that he and his girlfriend eat it at least once a week. Going away is apparently no reason to interrupt the arrangement.
“So this is to you what braaiing is to a lot of South Africans?” I ask.
He thinks about it. Yes, actually. That’s exactly it.
By this point in our meal at Chong Qing Hotpot in Cyrildene, the table is covered in ingredients, two broths are bubbling away between us and I’ve already eaten enough beef noodles to make the rest of lunch an ambitious undertaking. But the comparison makes perfect sense. There’s the food, obviously. Then there’s everything that happens while you’re making it: the talking, the sharing, the extra portion somebody insists you need.
Michael is very good at the extra portion.
I’ve recommended Chong Qing before. When Johannesburg In Your Pocket asked me about standout meals in the city, it was one of my picks: a place to sit above the bustle of Chinatown, mix your sauces and spend an afternoon cooking and eating with friends. Coming back with Michael, whose parents started the business, gave me a better understanding of the family behind it.
Cyrildene is often described as Johannesburg’s second Chinatown. The city’s older Chinatown developed around Commissioner Street; Derrick Avenue became another centre of Chinese business and community life during the 1990s. That history involves both businesses moving across the city and newer arrivals making homes here. It’s more complicated, and more interesting, than one Chinatown simply packing up and relocating.
The entrance signage to Johannesburg China Town in Cyrildene
Michael’s family story has its own route through Johannesburg. Before Cyrildene, there was Yeoville. Before South Africa, his father had worked in construction in China and had also run a hotpot restaurant.
“My dad was always quite adventurous,” Michael tells me.
He remembers his father seeing an opportunity to bring something he knew how to do to a new market. More than two decades later, the family business is still feeding people, with Michael now carrying it forward. The restaurant’s own account identifies him as Mike Wang and places his parents at the centre of its beginnings.
I’d assumed, from the restaurant’s name, that the family came from Chongqing. Michael corrects me: Sichuan. It’s a useful reminder to ask questions. The more time I spend eating with people, the more often some detail I thought I understood turns out to need another conversation.
Our next conversation happens over sauce.
The sauce station at Chong Qing
On an earlier visit, Michael had shown me how to make a dipping sauce. This time he makes two: a peanut sauce and a sweet-and-sour combination I’ve decided to call the Michael special.
Both begin with a generous amount of fresh garlic.
For the peanut version, he adds a homemade peanut-and-sesame paste. The family presses its own sesame oil, he explains, and keeps the remaining sesame paste to use in the sauce. It’s a small detail, but one that makes me pay attention. There is a whole process behind something I might otherwise have spooned into a bowl without thinking about it.
There’s garlic chilli oil, too, and MSG. Spring onion, coriander and their sesame oil go into both bowls. For the sweet-and-sour version, Michael uses sugar, oyster sauce and soy sauce, then finishes with sesame powder.
Watching him build them is part of the pleasure. So is knowing that these are the sauces you’ll keep returning to as different things come out of the pot.
But first, noodles.
Michael dishes noodles
Michael brings over his father’s spicy beef soup noodles, made with homemade egg noodles and beef that, he tells me, has been slow-cooked for 24 hours.
The beef is incredibly soft. The noodles give you something to work through. There’s spice, there’s broth, and there’s that deeply satisfying combination of hot soup and tender meat that makes you lean closer to the bowl and forget you’re supposed to be having a conversation.
My immediate response is that it’s “stupidly good”.
I stand by that.
This is the sort of thing I want after a big night: something spicy and beefy, with enough noodles to put me back together. Michael encourages me to get close and slurp. I explain that, from a distance, watching me eat a bowl like this probably looks as though a wild animal has been let loose.
He doesn’t seem especially concerned.
There’s cucumber salad and crispy pork belly as well. Michael tells me to use my fingers for the pork, then introduces me to his father’s chilli powder. He also shows me how the pork can take on another layer of flavour with a dip into the hotpot broth.
I keep going back to it.
Eventually, we get to the meal we ostensibly came for.
A hot pot with two sides. One spicy broth and one milder.
Our pot is divided between a spicy broth and a milder one. Around it, Michael has assembled what looks suspiciously like the entire menu: thin slices of beef, taro, mushrooms, corn, prawns, shrimp balls, coriander balls and more.
If you haven’t eaten hotpot before, the idea is straightforward. Ingredients arrive for you to cook in the simmering broth at the table, then eat with your dipping sauces. Ask for guidance on what goes in when and how long it needs; having somebody who knows the menu makes a first visit much easier.
It also helps to bring people you actually want to spend time with. This is a meal with room for a proper catch-up. You cook something, eat it, talk, notice something else you haven’t tried and start again.
I mention the sheer amount of food. Michael explains that, when friends or family get together, making sure everybody has eaten enough is essential.
“Full, full, full, full,” he says.
His ordering begins to make sense.
There’s a particular pleasure in eating with somebody who is so familiar with a dish that they can help you relax into it. Michael shows me how he likes things, answers my questions and keeps encouraging me to try more. By the time we’re talking about his holiday hotpot habit, I can understand why he wouldn’t want to leave it behind.
Much of his family is still in China. Here, he has his mother and cousins, the restaurant and a life he’s built in South Africa.
Towards the end of our meal, I ask whether he thinks he’ll stay.
“This is home for me,” he says. “This is definitely home for me.”
I’d come to find out how a family restaurant had lasted so long. The noodles offered a fairly persuasive explanation. So did the sauces, the crispy pork and the bubbling pot we’d spent the afternoon eating from.
But I’ll remember Michael making sure I’d tried everything, then telling me, without hesitation, where home is.
Go with friends. Ask for help with the sauces. Order the beef noodles, even if you’re there for hotpot.
And take Michael seriously when he tells you to come hungry.
Chong Qing Hotpot, Cyrildene, Johannesburg. Bookings: 083 554 3054. The restaurant lists opening hours as 11am–9pm, Wednesday to Monday. chongqinghotpot.co.za
Watch the Hammy Eats episode of Chong Qing Hotpot here:
Read more from Nick Hamman here.