Ocean View Market’s All You Can Eat Hot Pot Buffet!

Take as much as you want from the buffet, and cook it all over your

own electric flame

The Ocean View neighborhood is as lonely, wind-swept and economically depressed as any in San Francisco.  It lies in a forgotten little crevice just southeast of S.F State and Lake Merced, and within spitting distance from the next town over.  You could spit, or instead get your old slingshot out of hock, load it with a nice sharp rock, let fly and score a solid hit on the Daly City Bart Station.

Forming the centerpiece of a drab strip mall cum apartment block on the ass-end of Alemany Blvd., The Ocean View Market is a massive Chinese market peddling a little bit of everything.  However, the original impetus for my circuitous journey wasn’t to buy a lantern or an industrial barrel of jasmine rice; the particular siren song I was following down to the feet of San Francisco was something called “Hot Pot Buffet”.  The revelatory distinction between this iteration and other familiar varieties (Japanese, Korean), at least for this uncouth Westerner, was the buffet set against the left wall.  About 200 feet in length, it offers a jaw-dropping range of animal flesh, from the quotidian (thinly-sliced prime rib), to the grotesque and exotic (in spite of my open-mindedness, I had to shy away from the pig uterus).  Other ingredients include octopus, shrimp, sliced lamb, a variety of meatballs, pork liver, bok choy, broccoli, bamboo shoot, and a psychedelic panoply of condiments with which to add diverse, savory dimensions to your boiling stock.

When choosing amongst the various ingredients, the challenges to the amateur hotpot jockey are calculating cooking times and judging compatibility: Should I drop the cubes of pork blood in before or after the frog’s legs? How will cuddle fish jibe with pork tongue or chicken feet? These are important considerations, but they shouldn’t get in the way of the atavistic joy taken in authoring your own frothing, unnatural, Frankenstein’s monster version of soup.  Oh, and it’s all you can eat for 13 bucks.  Shazam!

Ocean View Market’s Hot Pot Buffet,

3995 Alemany Blvd.

[Ocean View]