New Chong Qing, The Hot Pot Spot

This week the weather is finally beginning to cooling down, meanwhile The Goldster treks out to San Gabriel for soup. More specifically fishy hot pots from New Chong Qing: "Sichuan-style hot pots are common in the San Gabriel Valley, and if you’ve done the rounds, you’ve seen your share of them, but the fish pot at New Chong Qing is almost another species: heaving rather than seething; delicate rather than overwhelming; forming fat, glassy bubbles rather than erupting into spitting, violent geysers of liquid. The broth is glazed with a thick, solid layer of scarlet oil; the murky depths hide bean sprouts, a few types of chiles, and one of those recently flapping tilapia, chopped into big chunks contoured to maximize the incidence of bone...Is the dish as intense as the water-boiled fish at either of the Chung Kings? Probably not, but the fish tends to be of higher quality." [LAW]