Almost all of these emporiums offer Sichuan hot pot, a broth covered in a deep slice of chile oil in which dried red chiles, Sichuan peppercorns and various other spices churn around like the remains of toy sailboats after a hurricane. But Da Long Yi Hot Pot, which opened in May in a second-story space above Canal Street, has the advantage over most of its competitors of having originated in Sichuan. Its home base, from which more than 200 Da Long Yis have issued, is the provincial capital of Chengdu. Chongqing was administratively sheared from the rest of the province in 1997.

Although you key your name into a touch pad at the top of the stairs to get on Da Long Yi’s waiting list, and you learn that your table is ready from an automated text, you order by penciling an X on the paper menu, in a box next to the item you want. The menu also suggests the length of time each item should be held down in the boiling soup.

It goes without saying that you will want a Sichuan hot pot at Da Long Yi. You will be asked whether you want it mild, medium or spicy, although in my experience there isn’t much difference. A more important question is whether you will cook your meal in Sichuan broth alone; in a split pot with Sichuan broth on one side and either tomato or mushroom broth, neither of them spicy, on the other; or in a three-chambered pot with some of each. The narrow range of choices can be an advantage for a novice hot potter, who might be swamped by the maximalist menus at Tang or Niu Pot.

The split pots make Da Long Yi a good place to take somebody with a low tolerance for heat, although as a practical matter it is impossible to eat a Sichuan hot pot meal without ingesting at least a spoonful or two of chile oil. Old hands know that the oil tends to pool away from the region of the broth that is bubbling most furiously, and ingredients that, after cooking, are removed from the pot in this area will emerge relatively clean.