Urban Hot Pot
stats:
Location:
Loveland, Colorado
Square Footage:
3,250 SF
Construction Date:
Completed August 2026
Designed by F9 Productions | Built by F14 Productions
Urban Hot Pot began with a vacant restaurant on a prominent corner of Main Street in downtown Loveland.
The space had previously been a wine bar but had been sitting empty, waiting for someone to give it another life. Urban Hot Pot saw the opportunity to do exactly that, bringing a completely different dining experience to the space and introducing hot pot to a new audience in Northern Colorado.
F9 Productions designed the restaurant, with sister company F14 Productions taking the project through construction. Together, the teams transformed the former wine bar into a bright, energetic restaurant built around something hot pot does especially well: bringing people together.
The Idea
Hot pot is as much a social experience as it is a meal.
Rather than ordering a finished dish from the kitchen, guests gather around the table and cook their own food in individual hot pot boilers. They move between their tables and self-service stations stocked with vegetables, seafood, sauces, and other ingredients, building their meal as they go.
That experience shaped the architecture.
The restaurant needed to feel open and vibrant while making it easy for people to move between the dining tables and self-service bar. With 2,250 square feet dedicated to dining, the challenge was also making a large room feel comfortable and inviting rather than cavernous.
Designing Around the Experience
Guests enter at a dedicated host station before moving into the main dining room.
Low partition walls break the dining area into smaller zones without closing them off from one another. They help bring the scale of the room down, provide some separation between groups, and help control sound while preserving the energy of a busy restaurant.
At the center of the experience is the self-service vegetable, seafood, and sauce bar. Its location and surrounding circulation were carefully considered because guests return to it throughout their meal.
Each table is then equipped with individual hot pot boilers, allowing every guest to create their own experience while still sharing the meal with everyone around them.
Personality Without Pretension
The client wanted Urban Hot Pot to be fun.
Not overly polished. Not overly serious. Just a lively place where people would feel comfortable coming in, trying something new, and enjoying themselves.
That personality became part of the space itself. The owner personally hand-painted artwork on the walls, giving the restaurant something that could never have come out of a catalog or been replicated somewhere else.
The result feels personal because it is personal.
Solving a New Kind of Restaurant
Urban Hot Pot was F9’s first hot pot restaurant, and that meant learning the details of a new restaurant type.
Individual boilers built into every table introduced equipment and infrastructure requirements that differ from a conventional restaurant. The self-service food stations created their own operational and circulation needs. All of it had to be coordinated with the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers while still working within an existing building.
Having F9 Productions design the restaurant and F14 Productions build it allowed that problem-solving to continue well beyond the drawings.
The same team could follow decisions from early design through construction, work through unexpected conditions in the field, and keep the original design intent in sight as the restaurant moved toward opening day.
The Result
Urban Hot Pot gives an empty corner of downtown Loveland a new reason to be busy again.
What had been a vacant wine bar is becoming a colorful, active restaurant built around food, conversation, and the simple fun of cooking together at the table.
For F9 and F14, the project was also a chance to learn a new restaurant type and once again put the architect and builder on the same side of the table.
For the client, it created something even more important: a restaurant that feels unmistakably like their own.
