The last time I had authentic Chinese food was in 2014 in Sheffield, United Kingdom. Living with three Chinese flat mates, there was no escaping a flour filled kitchen top, a smoky kitchen, a pressure cooker filled with sticky rice and pots emitting all kinds of mouth-watering aromas.

I recently went to Shenzhen, China with Huawei for a press trip and while I was there, I got my belly filled with all kinds of awesome East Asian goodness. Ever tried a hot pot meal? Well you are missing out. As the name suggests a hot pot of stock is placed on a table or burner and different ingredients are placed in the pot to cook.

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While in Shenzhen, along with the rest of the African delegates, we visited a restaurant called Haidilao Hot Pot. On arrival we were ushered into a private room. The table was set and in the middle of a boiler with four different sections filled with water. Immediately after strapping on aprons (we had to wear this to avoid getting stained), as you can imagine the first table topic was all about cooking. If you couldn’t cook, the hot pot experience was about to change a life!

The four different sections of the boiler were filled with different vegetable stocks: very spicy with tomatoes, mildly spicy with mushrooms, seafood stock and vegetarian stock with sweet corn. As this brewed, we were given pistachio nuts and currants to warm up our taste buds.

Minutes later, several ingredients were brought to the table to be cooked. This included prawns, tofu noodles, fish, meat, chicken and meat balls, crab sticks and sweet corn. These ingredients some of which were already parboiled were cooked in the hot pot on the table. We ate our hot pot dishes with a combination of dipping sauce. I had beef sauce with Thai chilli and soy sauce - Yum!

As we cooked, we ate - from what seemed like a bottomless pot. Everything was delicious but the fish cooked in spicy broth made me smile and do a dance in my chair. Surprisingly the tofu noodles were so delightful I smiled as I asked like Oliver Twist: “Please sir, can I have some more?” We were entertained by a masked dancer midway through our meal.

The hot pot meal is usually eaten from small dishes so it was pretty easy to eat a large meal without realising it. I guess this explains why it was so hard to move after.