All-you-can-eat hot pot is boiling in Hampton Roads. Here’s where to go and how to make the best of it.

Chinese hot pot is both a dinner and an activity set — a party in a bowl for people who like to play with their food. It is also a centuries-old tradition.

The modern restaurant version involves tabletop burners, and an oft-spicy broth into which you can dunk and cook seemingly any ingredient under the sun. Arrive in a group, and order broadly among meats and greens and mushrooms and seafood, and your table will look like Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Lunar New Year all at the same time.

Cook each ingredient in the spice of the pot, then pull it out and garnish with dipping sauce to taste: traditional garlic and sesame oil, or whatever else is at hand.

It is sloppy good fun — don’t wear white or you’ll look like you’ve been in an accident — a casual and mouth-tingling meal that will last as long as a fine-dining tasting menu. It is always best eaten in groups, a festive reward after a year of isolation for those of you flashing vaccination cards on your Twitter accounts.

Luckily, Hampton Roads now has at least two great all-you-can-eat hot pot options. One is refined, one is nearly unhinged. Both are recommended.

The most indulgent is the newest. From the people behind another piece of joyously nontraditional Asian cooking — local Viet-Cajun chain Boil Bay — Hot Pot 757 opened this spring. It is an impossibly broad smorgasbord of pan-Asian flavor, doubling as both bubbling hot-pot spot and a meaty Korean-style barbecue with grills built into the tables.

Hot pot is $25. Barbecue is $27. Both together are $30. But with the many worthwhile Korean barbecues locally, it’s the hot pot that makes the restaurant so welcome.

Choose from seven broth options that range from traditional Sichuan spicing to vegetarian Chinese herbal soup to who knows what (Tom yum Thai! Pig bone style! Mushrooms! Spicy butter and beef!). Then wander through a buffet half the length of a basketball court, with kimchi and dipping sauces for yards. Now, settle into an elaborate picture menu so long your eyes will cross and your children will fall asleep as you read.

Want mushroom? There are five, whether enoki or shiitake. Tofu? Seven versions live here, from skin to fried to soft. The range of meats would shame butcher shops, including prime brisket and lamb, multiple tripes and pork brain (though note that the pandemic has made brains precious, with supply chain issues making their presence less assured). Shrimp and mussels and clams and octopus? Multiple versions of fish? Enough greenery to fill a botanical garden? Check, check, check and check.

But plan ahead: It’s busy. Arrive too late on a weekend evening and waits can crest an hour. Even a 2 p.m. entrance on a Saturday will see half the restaurant fill in as you eat.

Meanwhile, esteemed Chinese spot Judy’s Sichuan Cuisine has offered a Chongqing-style hot pot for years, for two or more people at a time.

But if you weren’t aware of hot pot at Judy’s, that’s because it isn’t on the menu. Judy’s offers a broad menu of Sichuan delights, and so the laborious hot pots remain an off-menu treat. Judy’s avoids serving hot pots when the restaurant is too busy. The Virginia Beach location, in particular, won’t serve it on weekends.

But call ahead if need be, and try it sometime. The flavor at Judy’s comes through with much greater depth than at 757.

The hot pot at Judy’s has many fewer options and is much more traditional. It’s also slightly more expensive at $28 a person. But the higher quality of the meats, the balance in the chicken-based mala-spicy broth, and the purity of the “clean” broth make Judy’s a lovely and rewarding experience.

So choose your adventure: Would you like a refined version of hot pot, with balanced broth and flavor-packed ingredients? Or would you rather an all-encompassing and world-consuming odyssey through a quarter of the Asian continent, as well as three-quarters of the zoo? You have options.

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A how-to guide

Wherever you go, here’s a short guide to making the most of your hot-pot dinner.

Choose your order of cooking carefully

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn this, but everything you cook in a pot of broth will flavor the broth. If the first thing you do is dump a pile of octopus into your beef broth, your broth will henceforth taste a little like octopus. If this is intentional, good for you: You’ve succeeded!

A more traditional sequence might be to start with noodles, which need the longest to cook. Then move on to vegetables, which also need a few minutes — and can add depth to the broth without off-flavors.

Then, move on to meats such as beef or chicken or pork. And finally, seafood, which is the most aggressive in imparting flavors.

Another option? Make a seafood pot and a non-seafood pot. If you have two or more broths, this becomes pretty easy. Just make sure you agree as a table so your buddy Steve doesn’t muck up the beef with snapper and clams.

Don’t overcook your meats

Generally, your wafer-thin meat needs less time to cook than you think — and each item has its own schedule. Wheat noodles will need seven to eight minutes. Meat-filled dumplings might need a minute or two longer.

Root veggies like taro or lotus could take five minutes, while tofu might need two or three. Greens and mushrooms range from two to six minutes. Cook meatballs for a few minutes till they float, usually.

But the essence of hot pot is freshness, and most thin-sliced meats need a minute or less. Fish might clock in at just under a minute. With beef or lamb, you may need only 10 to 20 seconds.

Choose your technique

Are you a dipper or a stewer? Or are you both?

Traditional hot-pot technique might involve continually adding veggies to the pot but cooking each slice of meat individually, holding it under the surface of the boiling broth with chopsticks. Then, dredge each just-so piece of meat in your little cup of dipping sauce, chosen specially for the meat. Perfection. Precision. Beauty.

But many eaters of hot pot are instead stewers: You just sort of loosely compose a pot of variegated ingredients that seem like they’d go well together, dumping them in at what seems like appropriate times. Then you fish them all out together into your little bowl and maybe slop sauce on top. It is lazy and efficient, less precise in its cook times. And it is still wonderful. In this hot-pot life, there are no real wrong answers.

Don’t forget your greens

Hot Pot 757 and Judy’s Sichuan are all-you-can-eat and so the tendency might be to load up on meats to “get your money’s worth.” But students of digestion know you’re going to need that roughage or you’ll balance pleasure with discomfort. Get that fiber!

Judy’s is limited to cabbage or lettuce, served beautifully fresh. Hot Pot 757 has a whole greenhouse of options. Bok choy’s thick and crisp stems make it great for dipping sauce. But don’t sleep on the crown daisy greens, a mustardy leaf that both sops up flavor and adds to the depth of your broth.

Consider balancing your broths

Like spice? Great. But your meal’s going to last an hour or more.

In general, the ability to swap back and forth from spicy mala or tom yum to a less painful liquid will make your overall experience a little more pleasant and a less acidic. If you can get two broths, try it out on your first visit.

A three-broth pot, available at Hot Pot 757, might be overkill unless you’re in a large group or very good at multitasking. You’ll probably forget what you’re doing and overcook your beef tongue into shoe leather.

Be wary of delicate ingredients

Baby octopus sounds like fun, but do you know how to cook it? The window of opportunity is small — and unless you’re attentive you might get slop or vulcanize the poor thing into chewing gum. The window on thin-sliced chicken, between oh-God-don’t-eat-it and boiled rubber, can also be a little slim.

Generally, the fatty and red meats are a bit more forgiving in a boiling pot — your lamb, your brisket, your pork belly. Mushrooms will sop up flavor till the world ends. Scallops and shrimp can be cooked to transcendent perfection, but if you screw up and leave them in too long you probably won’t rue the day.

Vegetarians and vegans: Watch your back on broth refills

At Judy’s, broth is chicken-based. That’s just how it is.

At Hot Pot 757, the Chinese herbal broth is vegetarian, while mushroom broth can be vegetarian upon request. But the broth refill your server carries around is generally a chicken-based broth. Make sure to request either herbal broth or hot water refills, depending on what you’ve got going.

Don’t over-order. There’s more.

On the hot-pot menu, everything will look good. You’ll want it all.

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But at Hot Pot 757 in particular, if you wildly over-order you’ll incur a hefty charge of $13.99 a pound, for All That You Asked For But Can’t Eat. You can ask to take that excess food home, but the high price is meant to discourage waste and foolishness.

But there’s no real reason to order everything at once. Get around four items per person at 757 or three or four apiece at Judy’s to start. Judy’s loads up on beef but is daintier with seafood. 757′s servings of greens could fill produce sections.

And if you’re still hungry, order more later. The food arrives quickly, within three to four minutes of your asking for it. And then a fresh new feast will be yours for the cooking. It never ends, until you feel like a snake that has swallowed an elephant. Good luck.

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If you go

Hot Pot 757: 941 Chimney Hill Shopping Center Road, Virginia Beach, 757-390-3323, hotpot757.com. 1 p.m. to midnight daily. All-you-can-eat hot pot, $25; $30 if you add a tabletop barbecue.

Judy’s Sichuan: 1434 Sam’s Drive, Chesapeake, 757-410-5822; 328 Constitution Drive, Virginia Beach, 757- 499-2810; 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. All-you-can-eat hot pot, $28. (Not available at Virginia Beach on weekends.)

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com