There’s the familiar idiom of “everything but the kitchen sink.” that colloquialism encompasses the idea of maximalism, a deliberate strategy of adding as much detail and embellishment as possible to something. Maximalism is often seen in the arts, whether the elaborate recollections in the classic novels of Marcel Proust or the intricate music of Frank Zappa or Kamasi Washingoton. Tasty Pot, a chain of restaurants with a Mesa location, has its own maximalist approach to adding almost everything but the kitchen sink to its Taiwan-style hot pots.
Tasty Pot operates throughout the United States and Canada, generally with only one or two restaurants per metropolitan area. The Mesa restaurant is located in the Asian District in that city’s west end and is served by Sycamore/Main station on the A Line. Tasty Pot is situated inside Mekong Plaza, the shopping center that was a harbinger of the district’s expansion when it opened a decade-and-a-half ago. Bike racks are found in multiple locations outside the building’s entrances, and Tasty Pot can be reached from both outside and inside the mall.
The restaurant is full-service but encourages customers to order via phone after scanning a QR code at the table. The menu is succinct in terms of the dishes offered – just a dozen hot pots — but quite detailed about the lengthy lists of ingredients in each one. This is where maximalism comes into play. Each one has 20 or more main ingredients simmering in a pork broth, with the sole exception of the one meatless soup with a vegetarian base. Maximalism is also relevant to portion size. All bowls are hearty meals, and a few larger ones are easily in shareable territory.
To be clear, these are not the type of hot pots in which the diner cooks raw ingredients in a bubbling broth at the table. Instead, they’re big bowls of soup served in a base with a burner underneath. The food is already cooked to a safe temperature when it arrives at the table, but it’s up to the customer to adjust the flame or extinguish it entirely depending on personal preferences for soup temperature and the anticipated pacing of the meal. Servers passing by tables offer to pour more soup, or broth, into the bowl as a refresher while the meal progresses.
The best start for most customers might be either the beef or lamb hot soups. Both combine their respective red meats with vermicelli, enoki mushrooms, tofu, clam, and cilantro. Those are just the ingredients in common, though. From there, the hot pots follow their own paths with ingredients in the beef bowl like taro and tomato and enhancements for the lamb such as pork blood rice cakes. The latter is a harbinger of more offal to come, including pork intestine and aorta in some other soups. All orders can be customized to omit or add ingredients, though.
Other soups add flavored broths for hot pots like curry with sliced pork, napa cabbage, corn, tomato, egg, and multiple types of fish balls. All the bowls can be customized in terms of spice level from “none” to “flaming,” but the curry seasoning mix adds a bit of heat to the normally mild base. The same is true for the kimchi dumpling soup in which the fermented cabbage adds pockets of fire throughout the bowl. The cheesy milk soup is a bit milder due to the moderating influence of dairy while the stinky tofu hot pot has a distinctive taste from fermented bean curd.
The healthy veggie soup is the one meatless option, both in terms of the broth and the ingredients in the bowl. It’s bountiful and no less filling than the meatier soups on the menu. At the end of the menu, there are some larger options with even more ingredients and their own flavor such as Thai, Japanese miso, and Sichuan. The ultimate indulgences might be the Taiwanese supreme spicy soup, which has both beef slices and tendon, and the lobster seafood hot soup with a tail of the mentioned seafood centrally placed so that it dominates the bowl.
Because these soups are so comprehensive, there are no appetizers or sides except a choice of rice or extra noodles. There is also no dessert menu or liquor license, but the beverage selection has plenty of sweetness with drinks like taro milk tea or matcha latte with boba. Basic green or black tea is complimentary at lunch, which is when Tasty Post is least busy. At night, a crowd often waits in the Mekong Plaza hallway for tables. While no one wants everything but the kitchen sink all the time, there is clearly a market for maximalist meals on Main in Mesa.
66 S. Dobson Rd. #148, Mesa AZ 85202
https://www.tastypotusa.com
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