Flushing Hotpot

Mapo Szechuan 陈麻婆
37-04 Prince Street, Flushing, NY

I’ve been to many hoptpot places in Flushing and found this “newish” place to be the best. Although they have other food, we always go here for hotpot so my review is all hotpot related.

Drinks
If you go, you should get a pitcher of draft to start with. They carry Sam Adams regular and seasonal, and some others on tap. Decent selection of bottled beers, too. Finally, you don’t have to settle for Tsingtao and/or Coors Light!

Soup base
I like both the chicken herbal soup base and the spicy soup base. Recently also tried a kelp based soup which was much lighter (for those of you not crazy about herbal soups and can’t take the spicy one)

Sauce/dip
Since the soup base is quite good to begin with, you don’t necessarily need to dip your food in the sauce. However, they do have a sauce/dip station in case you want it. I always end up getting the same:
sesame paste, chive paste, ginger, chilies, scallion, and a ton of cilantro.

Meats
Since I can’t seem to find the menu, I’ll just say that this place has a good variety of beef (more so than most hotpot places). Tripe is also delicious but easy to lose in the mix. Their lamb is great. I don’t usually get pork but someone actually ordered pork belly once and I found it rather yummy. Must be all the fat surrounding it…Not sure about chicken, but I don’t like chicken much anyway. We’ve also gotten the seafood platter which is ok but too much work to shell the shrimp. I rather get seafood elsewhere in a good seafood restaurant.

Veggies
They have a veggie platter that comes with pieces of Chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, and rice noodles. Tofu is decent too. There’s this fried breadstick thing that goes well in the spicy soup.