chinese-cuisinefish
One of my friends tells about some kind of a delicious fish soup that he ate in china. But he doesn't know the name of the dish.
It was served in a big bowl in the center of the table (in a restaurant). The bowl is heating, and it's a soup that does not contain any fish. Some pieces of fresh cleaned fish are in front of each person, so he can put it in the soup, and after a minute, the fish is ready to be eaten.
Do you know the name of this food?
Per AsianResearch.org's article The Ancient Theory Behind Chinese Food:
Generally speaking, foods that have a higher water content are considered cool, or yin, in nature. These are often foods that are boiled or steamed. Foods that have a higher energy content, particularly from fat, are considered warm, or yang, in nature. These are often foods that are fried or roasted.
[...]
From [Chinese traditional element theory] comes the idea of the five flavours − bitter, sweet, spicy, salty and sour.
These flavours are subdivided into yin and yang. Sweet and spicy foods are considered to be yin, while bitter, sour and salty foods are considered to be yang. The five elements also correspond with the colours red, yellow, white, blue and green, which are all considered when choosing ingredients.
From your description, if it isn't tripe, then it is probably Bamboo Fungus. This is often used in soup an other dishes and has a neutral flavor. The texture can be from soft to slightly crunchy depending on the length of cooking.
Best Answer
Sounds like hot pot.
There are a zillion variations, with different kinds of broths and different things to cook in it, so I don't think there's any one recipe name you could search for to duplicate exactly what your friend had. It's possible that knowing the region he was in would allow some informed guesses from folks with some local knowledge (not me). Note that it's common to cook a lot of different things in the broth all at the same time, not just one thing per meal.
So if you want to try to make something similar without a lot of work, I suspect you'd just want to a broth you like (or a soup base from a Chinese grocery store - hot pot is popular!) and whatever simple fish sounds good to you. If you want more elaborate things, try Google; there's too much variety for us to try to cover it here.