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2015-08-01
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I have some friends who live in this area and frequent this restaurant. We all went out here when we failed to get a reservation at some other place. We wound up eating not at the main location, but at their overflow location around the corner. That was fine by me, but the small room did get a little loud at times.There's an English menu, but English really isn't a language of communication here. On the menu it says you can BYOB (for a fee), but they also have beer = Tsingtao.We got two kinds of
There's an English menu, but English really isn't a language of communication here. On the menu it says you can BYOB (for a fee), but they also have beer = Tsingtao.
We got two kinds of broth: oxtail broth (left) and Sichuan (right). The Sichuan broth was bright red, and full of lots of dried chilis, chili pulp, and Sichuan peppercorns. It was very spicy, and gave me a little bit of gastrointestinal distress, but it's all good. I love spicy.
I had never had frozen tofu, but I do recommend it. It's soft, but does not fall apart, and it soaks up lots of broth.
We got a variety of balls: beef, squid/ cuttlefish, fish, and pork & mushroom. My favorites were the beef (nice texture, beefy, no weird cartilaginous chunks) and the squid. Least favorite was probably the fish balls, but I've never really understood fish balls. According to Apple Daily, HK consumes 37.5 million fish balls a day. I'm not sure I believe that statistic though, since it's about 5 fish balls per person per day. Maybe...
We also got some pork and leek dumplings. They were OK. I haven't found any hotpot dumplings I like except those at Megans. These ones were bland and didn't do well at soaking up the sauce. They had bacon and mozzerella dumplings on the menu, but we decided against.
Nobody at the table knew what this was. We're pretty sure we didn't order it. Anyway, I did like it, whatever it was. They were round balls that were mostly hollow inside. Like the frozen tofu, it soaked up the broth really well, but it retained a lot of firmness as well.
Lotus root is always a favorite of mine for hotpot. These were a little browned by overexposure to air though, so I think they'd been sitting out cut for a while.
We got some boar 'cubes'. I wasn't too big on them. I maybe overcooked mine, so that could be one issue. They weren't bad but they weren't really my thing.
The lamb was my favorite of the night. Very tender, it cooked really quick, and it folded up naturally in a way that caught lots of chili and peppercorns, so eating a piece was like a fatty spice party in your mouth. Also recommended.
Finally, we got the pricier high-grade local beef. It was good, but I'm sure I didn't get the full high-quality beef experience when I coated it in chilis and oil and dipped it in soy sauce. A Japanese chef would probably whack me in the head if he saw me doing that to good beef.We got a few other things that are not pictured, and that I didn't get any of anyway: fried taro and some Romaine lettuce. I would've liked to try the taro, but I've never been into the boiled lettuce.
On the whole I liked the place. The service was friendly-- as I said, my friends are regulars, so they might get better service-- and the price was manageable at $450 per person, and that's with the expensive beef and enough food to stuff us pretty seriously (plus beers). It's tough to review hotpot places because really, you're the chef, but I liked the broth-- very spicy and flavorful-- I liked the means of conveying the broth to my mouth-- the frozen tofu and those air-filled balls-- and I liked the meat. What more can you say? Personal recommendation though: skip the fish balls, the dumplings, and the boar.
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