A lesson in what to do at KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot

The Grub Scout
| For the Knoxville News Sentinel

I know some folks were pretty stoked to hear that Knoxville was getting its own KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot franchise. There are more than 100 locations of the restaurant nationwide, so The Grub Spouse and I felt compelled to visit the new store in Turkey Creek.

I’d done the cook-your-own-meal experience many times before, both at local fondue and Korean barbecue eateries. But I should clarify from the get-go that I enjoy dining out because I want to be cooked for and served. If I wanted to prepare my own food, I’d stay home and cook. That being said, I get the attraction for some people, so I put my own prejudices aside to evaluate a KPOT meal on its own merits. But boy, was there a learning curve…

It was like the proverbial drinking of water from a fire hose as our server explained how everything worked. We were bombarded with steps and procedures and exceptions and choices. She was patient with us and did a fine job, but I think a few small tweaks in her presentation might have cleared up some early confusion on our part.

So this week, I’m sharing my take on how it all works. But there’s so much for me to cover that for the first time ever, I’m going to spread one review out over two weekly columns. (Check back next week to find out how I rated my visit.)

You first must decide whether you want to do a hot pot meal or a Korean barbecue meal for $29.99 per person (11 and older). If your table wants to try both, it’s $34.99 per person, regardless of which table guests choose to partake in which options. Of course, The Spouse and I wanted to try the whole shebang, so we did both.

We started with hot pots. (Our biggest mistake would be trying to do things sequentially, but more on that later.) Our server turned on two of the four hot plates built into our tabletop for heating up the soups and showed us how to control the temperature level. She also turned the single barbecue grill in the center of our table on to a low setting so it could be warming up for our barbecue meal later.

For hot pots, you choose from among eight soup bases, which your server must personally turn in to the kitchen. But then, using the tablet device on your table, you select from more than 60 sliced meats, meat sides, seafood items, soy bean products, vegetables and noodles to enhance your base. Once you’ve made your selections, you send your requests to the kitchen online. The tablet allows you to place an order only every five minutes.

I went with a seafood base and jazzed it up with squid, shrimp, udon noodles, sprouts and shitake mushrooms. The Spouse got a mushroom base and added sliced ribeye as an enhancement.

While we waited for food to start arriving from the kitchen, we checked out the massive sauce bar, which features some 20 different sauces that you can enjoy individually or mixed (although this really comes more into play when eating the barbecue). The bar also offers a selection of appetizer-style items you can nibble on, although I recommend saving your belly real estate for the soup and the ‘cue. For the record, we sampled the spring rolls and chicken wings. Finally, while you’ll find chopsticks and napkins on the tables, traditional utensils and dishes for sauces are at the sauce bar.

Due to a staff meeting, our extra items arrived before our server was able to show up with our bases and do a quick tutorial on adding the meats and veggies and such to the broth. We found that the soup bases, which are delivered in metal containers, heated quickly on the hot plate’s high setting. When they were bubbling, we dumped our additional meats and veggies and such into our respective bases. I mainly had to make sure my raw shrimp turned nice and pink before digging in. The cooking process took only a few minutes.

Each base comes with its own ladle, which we used to transfer the soups from the hot pots to our individual soup bowls. You can actually use the ladle as a spoon as well, but that felt weird, so I fetched us a couple of soup spoons from the sauce bar. At that point, we finally had the ball rolling.

But we were just getting started. Check back next week to find out how we managed the barbecue portion of our meal and what I actually thought of the food itself.