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Pick-your-own seafood hotpot draws 3,000-table queues in Hangzhou
排队超3000桌 商场自选海鲜火锅火了
A restaurant format from Fuzhou, where diners pick seafood from open counters and pay by the plate, is drawing very long queues in Hangzhou shopping centres.
In short
On Saturday 31 October 2026, before 6 pm, a self-select seafood hotpot restaurant on Hangzhou’s Xingguang Avenue had more than 3,000 tables waiting in its online queue, and another in Xiaoshan more than 2,000, Dushi Kuaibao reported. The format, which started in Fuzhou, lets diners pick seafood from open counters and cook it in their own pot for about ¥100 (US$14) a head.
How the format works
Seafood hotpot of this kind began in Fuzhou, a port city in Fujian province. Instead of ordering from a menu, diners walk along open counters and tanks of live seafood, pick what they want on small plates, and cook it at the table in an individual pot. Each plate is priced, so the bill is simply the plates taken.
The 21st Century Business Herald reported in August that the leading brand, Zhu Fugui (朱富贵), keeps spending at about ¥100 (US$14) per person, compared with about ¥300 for a conventional seafood meal. Its founder, Zhu Xiangkang, described the restaurants as ‘canteens’ that rely on frequent repeat visits. Some of its seafood reaches restaurants four to six hours after being bought at Fuzhou’s Mawei wholesale market or straight from the docks.[3]
The Hangzhou queues
Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province about 150 km south-west of Shanghai, is now one of the format’s busiest markets. The local newspaper Dushi Kuaibao reported on 3 November that before 6 pm on the previous Saturday, the mini-programme queue at a self-select seafood hotpot restaurant on Xingguang Avenue, a shopping street in the city, passed 3,000 tables, while another restaurant in Xiaoshan district had more than 2,000 tables waiting. The report did not name the operator.
Restaurants in China commonly take numbers through WeChat mini-programmes, so diners can join a queue from home. The paper put the appeal down to diners choosing for themselves, seafood that is visibly fresh, clear prices, and each person having their own pot.[2]
Big chains join in
Most seafood hotpot brands are small. The restaurant industry site Hongcan reported in November 2025 that most had five outlets or fewer, with typical spending of ¥90–120 per person. Zhu Fugui, founded in 2019, had 32 directly run restaurants by May 2026, 24 of them in Fujian and the rest in Zhejiang, and expects revenue of about ¥800 million (US$112 million) this year, according to the Herald.
Larger chains have followed. Hongcan reported that Haidilao, China’s biggest hotpot chain, added seafood self-select areas to three of its Fuzhou restaurants in late 2025, pricing most seafood at ¥14.96 per plate, with more planned in cities including Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Wuhan. Dushi Kuaibao said Haidilao and the upmarket seafood brand Bafenggang have both recently opened their own self-select seafood hotpot outlets.[4][3][2]
Sources
- Baidu Hot Search (3 November 2026, in Chinese) · accessed 3 Nov 2026
- Dushi Kuaibao via Sina: Behind the 3,000-table queues for self-select hotpot (3 November 2026, in Chinese) · accessed 3 Nov 2026
- 21st Century Business Herald via NetEase: The secret of Fujian’s affordable seafood hotpot (23 August 2026, in Chinese) · accessed 3 Nov 2026
- Hongcan via 36Kr: Haidilao targets the seafood hotpot business of Zhu Fugui and others (November 2025, in Chinese) · accessed 3 Nov 2026
Picked from Baidu’s public hot-search list and checked against the reports above. Suggest a correction