Jeannie Z.
Yelp
This place is so amazing!! Hands down best hot pot I've ever had. I came here once last year when I visited Vancouver, and let's just say when I came back to Vancouver this year we literally booked an airbnb that was walking distance from here (the fact it's close to a subway station helped :p) so we could come more often! We came back twice in 1 trip!
The funny thing is, non-food wise, this place has so many red flags that normally would make me rate it lower, but the food is just so damn good I don't care about any of those things and would eat here forever no matter what (unless their food was literally making me sick)!
Let's talk about the food - the ingredients are so, SO fresh, high quality, and delicious. Fatty beef - incredibly marbled and just melts in your mouth. Lamb - mixed in the spicy broth is heaven. Fish tofu - chewy, and great umami. Seafood - all their seafood is live and they'll show you what I looks like before preparing it for you; you can get anything from shrimp, to crab, to lobster, to fish, to geoduck, to abalone. There is an array of very fresh seafood, very signature of an expensive Chinese restaurant. Meat balls and wonton are clearly home made and very fresh. Even the veggies! I had the best spinach of my life and I don't even like spinach lol.
Now the broth - there are many, many broths to choose from, and each just has an incredibly distinct flavor. They're not cheap broths mind you (anywhere from $8-$60), but you certainly get what you pay for. We've gotten the Szechuan spicy version which is very potent, spicy, and numbing. It was so good my boyfriend (who's not very spicy tolerant) drank 2 whole spoonful of it because it was so delicious! The parsley and thousand egg broth had such a refreshing, and aromatic flavor I made the most delicious veggies in it. The pork bone soup is meaty and comes with enough food in it to make it its own hot pot!
Now the "sketchy" stuff... the servers prefer to speak Chinese so that coupled with a confusing menu makes the first ordering stressful (but after the first time, we learned to study the menu beforehand so we know what to order lol). Reservations don't mean much (at least for 2)... when they get really busy during dinner time, you'll get served when you get served. The prices some times seem like totally pulled out of a hat and have no consistency - lamb is $12, beef can be ~$25, then abalone is like $120/lb (min 1.5 lbs), veggies are HUGE plates for $8, fresh shrimp is $5 per shrimp. And lastly, they vary between having VERY good service to some times ignoring you. But! As I said, given how tasty this place is, none of this matters and I've found ways around it all!