Ain't No Party Like A Hot Pot Party At NYC's Maritime Hotel

September 23, 2009 at 10:55 AM | by JetSetCD | 0 Comments

We love hotels, and we love food. Thank heavens that a good hotel usually comes with a great restaurant, and if we're lucky, a talented chef to boot. This is the case at The Maritime Hotel in New York, which dilutes its mild nautical theme with a lower-level Japanese restaurant, Matsuri.

For the restaurant's 6th anniversary, the menu will include traditional hot pot favorites of chef Tadashi Ono (who also made Matsuri's ceramic crockery by hand), and last night the celebration kicked off with a party to reveal the restaurant's new cookbook: "Japanese Hot Pots: Comforting One-Pot Meals," authored by Ono and Harris Salat.

And since ain't no part like a hot pot party, we stopped by for a bit to sample the sake and Ono's cuisine. Believe it or not, The Maritime's Matsuri boasts New York's largest selection of sake and the only sake sommelier in the city. After a ceremonial "Kagami Biraki," or breaking of the sake barrel, we tucked into tastings of chicken, fish and beef hot pots. Although the crowd favorite seemed to be the beef, we "mmmm-ed" at the fish hot pot thanks to its inclusion of roe. We love us some roe.

The new Hot Pot menu will be available from October 13, but the cookbook is already up for sale now at Barnes & Noble ($25) and Amazon.com ($16.87). It's a little bit like Chicken Soup For The Soul, except without all the weepy pathetic stories and instead full of good old recipes and tidbits on Japanese cuisine.

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