If Chongqing had its own flag, it could be adorned with a steaming vat of spicy hot pot.
Mala tang was invented there and you can find a Chongqing hot-pot restaurant in virtually every city in China.
Hot pot is a steaming, bubbling vat of pepper and oil, and you order raw ingredients such as cow's stomach, duck intestines, chicken kidneys and beef or pork strips, and mushrooms, potatoes, bean sprouts and tofu strips, and then drop them into the vat as desired.
After the ingredients are cooked, you scoop it out and drop it into a bowl with your own sauce.
Most Chongqing hot-pot restaurants have garlic and sesame oil as the base and then you can add vinegar, clam sauce, soy sauce, salt, MSG, more garlic or coriander leaves according to taste. There is no end to the things you can drop into boiling oil.
You can find hot pot featuring frog, crab, fish, beef, lamb and rabbit, varying from spicy to savoury, or sweet and even spicy and sweet.