MOSCOW — Thinly sliced beef, shrimp, lotus root and noodles are among more than 30 ingredients on the menu at Everhot Mongolian Hot Pot, a restaurant where diners cook their meals at their tables.

Diners simmer bite-size pieces of seafood, meat, tofu, noodles and vegetables in broth on burners built into every table. This allows groups to tailor meals to their own preferences, said Jessica Liu, the owner.

The restaurant at Moscow’s Palouse Mall has four types of broth — bone, hot and spicy, mushroom and tomato — with the first two being the most popular, said Meredith Sleight, the restaurant’s manager.

“Definitely the most mild one is the bone broth,” Sleight said. “It’s nurturing. It’s almost like you can taste it’s good for you. It has a lot of collagen in it. The hot and spicy is definitely our most flavorful.”

Once the food is cooked according to directions listed at every table, customers remove it from the pots with tongs or chopsticks and add peanut sauce, sesame garlic sauce or a dry, hot mix of dipping spices.

The options range from the familiar, like sirloin steak, Spam, broccoli and potatoes, to more exotic choices such as lotus root, baby bamboo, Japanese Shimeji mushrooms and Korean Enoki mushrooms.

Lotus root is a vegetable that tastes like a mix of sweet potato and jicama with a texture similar to a radish. Baby bamboo has a flavor similar to green beans and cooks like noodles. Enoki mushrooms are also like noodles while Shimeji mushrooms have hints of seafood flavors.

Typically diners spend an hour or more savoring the experience while talking about foods they love and discovering new favorites, Sleight said.

The cost depends on how many ingredients people order, with customers typically spending $15 to $20 per person. Each type of broth costs $3.25 per person. The price of ingredients ranges from $1.45 for instant noodles to $12.50 for marbled beef.

The two groups who know the most about hot pots are Asian families and teenage boys who learned about it through video games and anime, a type of animation that originated in Japan, Sleight said.

“It’s fun to watch them have it for the first time because they’ve seen it a million times in their shows,” Sleight said. “And now they get to really finally try it. It’s a lot of fun to serve people something that’s a little more unusual.”

The concept for hot pot is one that Liu, of Pullman, has been fine-tuning for more than four years. She learned the nuances of hot pots while making them for her family, sometimes using them as a way to upscale leftovers.

She hopes her restaurant will do well in Moscow, Liu said, partly because when her family travels, her sons always want to stop at hot pot eateries in cities like Seattle and Spokane.

The address of Everhot is 1920 Pullman Road. Its hours are 4-8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, noon to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon to 7 p.m. Sunday. The restaurant stops seating one hour before it closes to give customers enough time to cook and eat their orders.

Lewiston’s new Southway restaurant grows one slice at a time

The menu of a new Southway in the Lewiston Orchards is similar to the first location of the restaurant with one important exception.

Southway on Thain sells pizza by the slice 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, according to a news release from Happy Day Corp., the company that owns the restaurant.

The single servings of pizza cater to students at Lewiston High School, which is just blocks away, as well as employees of surrounding businesses, according to the news release.

Other dishes Southway on Thain offers are pizzas, chicken wings, salads and breadsticks.

The manager of Southway on Thain, at 247 Thain Road, is Dylan McKelway, who started at Happy Day restaurants six years ago as a pizza delivery driver, according to the news release. In his time with the company, he has been promoted to crew trainer, supervisor and assistant manager at the original Southway at 721 Southway Ave., where half of the crew for the new location trained.

The Southway in the Orchards has limited seating. The largest share of its orders are for takeout and delivery customers.

So far, the volume of business at the new Southway has exceeded expectations. So many people ordered on Mother’s Day, for example, that the restaurant ran out of pizza boxes, according to the news release.

The hours of the new Southway are 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Orders for pick up or delivery are accepted at happydayeats.com or by calling (208) 743-0400.

In addition to the two Southways, Happy Day operates Mystic Cafe, Main Street Grill, Tomato Bros., Zany’s, three Taco Times, four Arby’s and one A&W in north central Idaho and southeastern Washington.

Infuse & Booze hits the Big Apple

A business founded in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley two years ago with products that simplify cocktail preparation is gaining an even larger national presence in spots as hip as Manhattan.

Infuse & Booze sells dried fruits, herbs, sugar sticks and other ingredients in jars. Customers add spirits, water or lemonade and leave the containers in their refrigerators for as little as four hours or as long as three days to allow the flavors to blend.

Anthropologie and Terrain stores now carry the Infuse & Booze brand, said Amy McCall, an owner of the company, in an email. The stores are a part of URBN, a company that includes Urban Outfitters.

Infuse & Booze products have also been featured on “Good Morning America” and “Wake up with Marci,” a show that has aired one segment about the business and has two more scheduled, McCall said.

McCall and Jamie Laybourn, the co-owner of Infuse & Booze, traveled to New York City for the filming of the “Wake up with Marci” episodes.

“It’s delicious,” said Marci Hopkins, the host of the show, as she sipped a nonalcoholic version of a Pacific mule made from an Infuse & Booze kit.

“I love the dried fruit on top,” Hopkins said. “It’s got a little kick to it. …I love that you can make a mocktail or a cocktail out of these.”

McCall and Laybourn shared a little about their lifestyle in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley on the show.

“We’re just busy moms,” McCall said. “We have kids. They’re in activities. We’re busy ourselves with jobs and husbands and friends. We wanted to come up with something that would make home entertaining fun and easy.”

The concept is resonating with a large audience, McCall said.

Revenue at the company is showing a double-digit percentage annual increase through expansion into new states and continual development of new flavors that stay ahead of market trends, McCall said.

Some of the best sellers are Old Fashioneds, a Bloody Digger that can make a Clam Digger or a Bloody Mary and a Cactus Cooler that features watermelon, lime and prickly pear.

The online store of Infuse & Booze is at infuseandbooze.com. The brick and mortar stores that carry its products in the region include Patt’s Garden Center in Clarkston, The Tin Can Company in Clarkston, Erb’s Ace Hardware in Lewiston, DZ Designs in Lewiston, Coco Bee in Colfax and the Moscow Food Co-op.

Zions Bank employees set to spruce up YWCA bungalows in Lewiston

Zions Bank employees will be painting and doing landscape work at YWCA apartment bungalows in Lewiston this week.

The apartments, which provide affordable housing for underserved or disabled individuals, haven’t been painted in 15 years, according to a news release from Zions Bank.

The project is part of Zions Bank’s 32nd annual Bank Paint-a-Thon where more than 1,000 of the financial institution’s employees and their family members volunteer to clean, scrape and paint 28 residences in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming this month.

Williams may be contacted at ewilliam@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2261.