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Q: Was the person who invented hotpot a genius?
My roommate took me out to a nice hotpot restaurant and during the meal asked this question.
On one hand, it's pretty ingenious to have a meal you can cook right at the table. That way you can just cook and eat all while enjoying the company of friends. Plus it makes it a little bit like cooking around a campfire, a primitive human instinct. For thousands of years humans cooked and ate around the campfire, and the hotpot inventor took the idea and made it into something we can enjoy in modern days of great civilization.
On the other hand, it's not that ingenious at all. Simply like cooking around a campfire, but in a restaurant.
So how would you answer my roommate's question: "Was the person who invented hotpot tiantai/genius/"
I would not go so far as to call him or her a genius, but he/she did have a great idea!
I personally love the Korean BBQ where you roast your meat right there at the table. And I agree, it sort of does appeal to some instinct we still have.
Hulk:
The Korean BBQ in Hubei was freaking AMAZING. I loved the peanut sauce too... wow.
I both like it and dislike it. As Sam has pointed out, I like it because you are 'cooking' a meal with friends.
But at the same time, why would i go to a restaurant and pay to 'cook' my own food? 
sam239:
Well i know from working in a restaurant that prepping is where the grueling work is. So you're paying them to do the hard part while enjoying the fun part of the cooking!
Chinese based meals are great in that they engage everybody at the table
though it does remind me of a line
Dinner is served .....some assembly required 
I would say so...he created something that made him a multi-millionaire..
Genius,, no. Many cultures have similar ways of cooking and I do not like hotpot. The first time I had hotpot my GF gave me a bowl of soup, chopped up arteries.? I said puck me that looks like a bowl of chicken assholes. I don't like most Chinese cooking unless I can get real meat, not bones or shoe leather beef.
TedDBayer:
I had a hotpot dish that was just duck heads. I have one of the skulls mounted in my book case.
Absolutely! Getting your customers to pay to cook their own food, what is not genius-like about that?
Cutting massive overheads in a restaurant by just not having any staff to cook the food has to rank as one of the best business plans of all time.
I really fail to see the attraction of hotpot, or most Chinese food for that matter.
There are a few dishes that are excellent to eat, but hotpot is not one of them.
I propose that like all incredible inventions hotpot was invented by someone that was very bored. Genius or not, new inventions are spawned by people with imagination and time.
