HaiDiLao Brings a Bit of Razzle Dazzle to Fremont’s Late-Night Hot Pot Scene

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

When I was growing up in my immigrant Chinese-Taiwanese household in the ’80s and ’90s, my family thought of hot pot as the humblest of home foods — perfect for cold, lazy days when you couldn’t be bothered to cook, but not really even a meal suitable for company, much less something you’d splurge on at a fancy restaurant.

We never could have imagined today’s landscape of pristine malatang bars and all-you-can-eat wagyu beef shabu shabu. Who could have guessed that hot pot would become a trendy luxury food, with high-end mega-chains multiplying across East Asia and eventually landing here in the Bay? And in many neighborhoods, these epicenters of hot, bubbling broth might be the only restaurant in the general vicinity that’s open late.

That’s how we ended up at HaiDiLao in a Fremont strip mall at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, sliding into an open booth inside a bright, expansive dining room packed mostly with young Asian Americans. The restaurant is open until 2 a.m. every night, and its late-night hours are especially appealing to the budget-minded: On weekends starting at 9:30 p.m. (and 8:30 on weekdays), there’s a 31% happy hour discount on all hot pot dishes — or, as it’s phrased in Chinese, “69% price.” (Nice.)

If you’ve heard of HaiDiLao, that’s probably because it’s literally the largest, most successful hot pot chain in the world, with an estimated $14 billion market cap and more than 1,300 locations in China, its home base, alone. In Asia, the chain is ubiquitous enough that hot pot snobs consider it tacky, with some haters going so far as to call it the “overpriced McDonald’s of hot pot restaurants.” Here in the Bay Area, however, it’s still a relative novelty, with just one other location (in Cupertino) — and both the food and the experience are good enough to outshine most of the local competition.

HaiDiLao’s claim to fame is its focus on providing a more luxurious, pampering approach to the customer experience, which expresses itself in what felt to me like particularly Chinese ways. The overflow waiting area (basically a bar counter) has several Chinese checkers boards, that little magnetic fishing game that every Chinese kid played when they were little and even an electronic eyeglass cleaner. You also get a whole apron, not just a bib, to keep your clothes clean of splattering broth. And little R2-D2–sized robot trolleys bring your raw ingredients to the table because why not?

Even with the late-night discount, this is an expensive meal — easily upwards of $50 a person depending on your appetite and ordering discipline, which puts it in the same price tier as the fanciest all-you-can-eat joints. So it’s good that the food mostly stacks up.

Start with the soup base, which HaiDiLao offers in eight varieties, listed on the iPad menu from spiciest (the Chengdu-style beef tallow hot pot brimming with red chilies) to not spicy at all (say, the mushroom- or tomato-based broths). We opted for a split pot, with the medium-hot spicy pork bone broth and a more mild broth made with pork stomach and chicken. The former was flecked pieces of kimchi, for a bit of a Korean vibe, and had a good depth of the flavor. The latter — our favorite — had the subtle medicinal quality of a home-cooked broth and a slight gaminess from the slices of chewy, tender stomach. This is one you actually want to drink as a soup, especially on a cold night. (Pro tip: If at the end of the meal you tell the server, “I like your soup base” — in English or Mandarin — they’ll give you an extra bag of broth to bring home with your leftovers.)

We were also impressed by the sheer variety of offerings beyond the typical plates of thinly sliced meat. The fresh seafood options are especially robust. We loved the thick, lush slices of marinated basa, which came pre-seasoned, deliciously, with a hint of numbing Sichuan peppercorn. One of the more unusual offerings were little cigars of shrimp paste wrapped in some kind of spongy fungus and crowned with a scattering of flying fish roe at the tip. Once they firmed up in the broth, they bore an unfortunate resemblance to half-flaccid penises — but uncommonly tasty ones, especially when dipped into the garlicky sesame paste dipping sauce that I’d concocted at the serve-yourself sauce station.

And even though HaiDiLao doesn’t boast the innately decadent all-you-can-eat model of a high-end buffet like Mikiya, it does have its own elements of razzle dazzle and charm that help make for a fun night out. Wagyu lovers can splurge on the “wagyu tree,” which, true to its name, is a big mound of ice upon which they’ve arranged a portion of extremely well-marbled Japanese beef so that it does resemble a pink, meaty Christmas tree. Is it Instagram and TikTok bait? Of course. Is the meat some of the most extraordinarily soft and tender I’ve had for hot pot? Also yes.

Most memorably, for just $5, you can order a tableside “dancing noodle” show, inspired by the style of flashy hand-pulled noodle-making you’ll see in parts of northern China. In our case, it turned out to be a young Latino guy who pulled up to our table and asked if we had any song requests before queuing up Pitbull’s “DJ Got Us Falling in Love” on his phone. The performance that followed was akin to watching a pizza man at a rave, as he stretched a piece of dough longer and longer, spinning it around, over his head and behind his back, whipping the noodle toward us — just kidding! — and causing it to form quick ripples. (Afterward, he explained that he’d started at HaiDiLao as a busboy and basically taught himself how to pull noodles just by watching the previous Chinese noodle master, who didn’t speak any English. Immigrants! They get the job done.)

We were so distracted by the song and dance of it all — a spectacle I never could have imagined as a young, naive hot pot eater — that we almost forgot to fish the finished noodles out of the broth. Even gone a bit soft, they were thoroughly, slurpably enjoyable.

HaiDiLao Hot Pot’s Fremont location is open Mon. to Thu. 11:30 a.m.–2 a.m. and Fri. to Sun. 11 a.m.–2 a.m. at 43349 Boscell Rd. The restaurant also has a location in Cupertino.