Annabelle H.
Yelp
We came here for lunch today and really enjoyed our ayce hot pot meal! Everything tasted good and went above my expectations. I thought this was just going to be another average restaurant with expensive ayce hot pot, that I would begrudgingly pay for because of my love for hot pot, but honestly, they actually give you quality for the price. The most important thing for me at hot pot is the meat, and their meat was so delicious! The pricing is $38 per person on weekends, but if you check in on yelp, you can get a small discount so it comes out to a little over $36/person. Their weekday prices are a little cheaper, if you can come on a week day. However, even at this price point, I think it's worth it if you're a big meat eater like me and love some good quality meat.
To go into detail on the meat, our favorites were the regular prime beef and the lamb. Both were so tender and flavorful - full of delicious meat flavor! We also really enjoyed the US prime beef - texture was not as delicious as the first two but the flavor was really meaty! The pork belly and the wagyu were good as well, just not as good as the other ones in our opinion. But if you do all you can eat, I still recommend trying it all because they're all pretty good!
For the other dishes, everything was straightforward. We enjoyed the veggies, the mushroom medley, some beef and fish balls - all pretty good. My boyfriend liked adding the fried gluten balls which are yummy for absorbing the soup flavors. Speaking of soup flavors, their soup bases impressed us! We got the spicy for one and the chicken and coconut for the other. We were surprised they actually put a fresh coconut in there with both coconut meat and coconut juice! It works pretty well and I loved the coconut juice flavor mixed with the beef as we cooked the meats! The cooked coconut meat was also so interesting but quite tasty? Kind of want to try it at home now... One thing we were curious about is, whether we can pick more than 2 soup bases... The pot we got actually was divided in 4 instead of the traditional 2 - we might ask to try 4 soups instead if that is possible next time! That'd be pretty cool, especially since the two flavors we tried were already so good, and we'd be able to try 2 more!
I can't forget to mention that with the ayce comes free boba milk tea too! And I was fully ready to try some mediocre boba, but I was sooooo surprised when the boba milk tea was actually delicious?! The boba was the perfect texture - not too mushy or too chewy and the milk tea reminded me of taiwanese milk tea. It went way above my expectations and the perfect amount of sweet mixed with tea flavor - would definitely have it again!
Also not pictured is their sauce bar. It's tucked in the corner of the restaurant and they had a decent selection of sauces! I really liked their house sauce. They also had the classic sesame sauce as well as ponzu, satay, XO sauce and more.
The service was good too - the staff was really nice and would check on us as well as bring out our orders in a timely manner. The restaurant wasn't super busy, which I'm surprised about because it's so good! They actually have a very large menu of other items like personal hot pot, some chinese dishes, DIY seafood broils, and way more! I want to say I'll be back to try some of their other menu items, but to be honest, I'll probably be back for more hot pot - it's my new favorite hot pot spot in the east bay!