Tasty Pot — Midtown hot pot
Where locals eat, not where the casinos want you — individual hot pot in Reno's Midtown.
Key facts
- Tasty Pot, 716 S Virginia St, is a Taiwanese-style individual hot-pot restaurant in Midtown — you get your own simmering pot and choose your broth.
- Midtown is Reno's eclectic, locally-owned strip south of the casinos — the Asian food here (hot pot, pho, Korean, Taiwanese) is part of the living Asian Reno the tour is about.
- Hot pot is a communal, gather-round-the-table meal — the thread that connects this stop to downtown's newer shabu-shabu room a few blocks north.
Narration transcript
On Virginia Street right about here, in the middle of Midtown, is a little place called Tasty Pot — and it's a good first taste of what this tour means by "the other Reno." This is Midtown: the stretch south of the big casinos where the shops and kitchens are small and local, and a lot of them are Asian. Tasty Pot does individual hot pot — your own pot of broth bubbling at your table, and you cook what you like in it, a little at a time, for as long as you want to sit there.
That last part matters, because hot pot isn't really fast food — it's a gathering. You come with people, you stay a while, you talk over the steam. Keep that in mind, because this is the first of two hot-pot rooms on this drive, and the second one, downtown, sits just a few blocks from where Reno's Chinese community lived more than a century ago. Mark this place for later — come back hungry. For now, we keep driving north, into downtown.