karen wrote:

> aem wrote:
>
>>When this thread started I thought it was a joke. A restaurant devoted
>>to fondue? How droll! And now it turns out there's a chain, and
>>specialty menus for holidays, and they're expensive. Live and learn.
>>Folks who like this kind of thing should also check out restaurants
>>that serve Mongolian Hot Pot and Japanese shabu-shabu.
>>
>>-aem
>
>
> Some folks don't want to make fondue at home, so they pay for it.
>
> I've been making fondue since the 70's. I fill one pot with beef stock
> and the other with oil. The first pot makes a good base for an onion
> soup later. I will have to try the broccoli.
>
> I make a lot of sour cream-based sauces. We don't tend to like the
> mayonnaise ones as much. Finely-chopped mushrooms with onion cooked in
> butter with wine go over big. Also, you can add sour cream to that.
> Always some garlic butter, as the meal is served with French bread.

Used to be a restaurant in NYC called La Buena Mesa that did fondues.
Late 60's, IIRC.

We did fondues in all my restaurants and they sold well. Basic beef,
cheese and chocolate. But as we evolved, they became more elaborate
and complex (and expensive), and still sold well. We had a huge brass
Huo-kuo or Mongolian Fire Pot that was popular.

In a resort I ran, we did a special event every Wednesday that we
called "An Evening of Fondues." It was a big room with round tables in
the middle for people to sit at with rectangular tables all around the
edges with different kind of tabletop cookery. We did fondues that
cooked with oil or broth. Meats, seafoods, veggies, pastas, batters to
dip into before oil-cooking, etc. We did classic cheese. Raclette.
Bagna caoda. And several different sweet fondues including chocolate
(white and dark), peanut butter, fruit sauces (strawberry with
strawberry liqueur, etc.) and maple sugar/cream. Every Wednesday night
we had 17 stations of different fondues selected from our rather
longer list.

Pastorio