SPK is the brainchild of 32-year-old Shengbo Chen, a San Diego IT engineer who this week opened his eighth location in Fremont, California. If you find Sichuanese hot pot too intense you might consider Sizzling Pot King, the seventh outpost of a rapidly expanding west-coast chain, which opened in Greektown last March, assuming the title of de facto king of Hunanese-style dry hot pot in Chicago. Hunanese is generally regarded as spicier and brighter than Sichuanese food, and in it peppercorn ma la is usually subordinate to chile heat-though you can still catch a buzz.
In fact, as a city we’ve been denied the unique pleasures of food from that particular southern Chinese province since Tony Hu’s late, great, and tragically short-lived Lao Hunan went down with the Mayor of Chinatown. What we haven’t seen, until now, was a distinctly Hunanese version of that experience. If you’ve visited any of them, you’re acquainted with the singular pleasure of hunkering around a roiling vessel of soup and oil, chile, and myriad spices-probably in a group, maybe one on one-your brains thrumming with the electric current of Sichuan peppercorns, dunking morsels of flesh and vegetables into the brew, retrieving them with chopsticks, and gobbling them down until endorphins have flooded your brain and you’ve achieved a perfect state of euphoric exhaustion. You may have noticed the proliferation of Sichuan-style hot-pot restaurants in Chinatown in recent years. I’ve often wondered: Who is the king of Hunanese-style dry hot pot in Chicago? Until last March there was no answer to the question. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.
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