Rolling Pot - The Full Story

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Asians have a way of dealing with the cold weather. Different places call it different things, but Chinese call it 'Hot Pot'. It involves a portable burner, a bot with hot water, a bunch of raw/cooked ingredients, and a bunch of people sitting around the table. The idea is put food in the boiling water and cook them. Surprisingly it takes only a few mintues to cook each item. Ingredients include raw beef slices, raw lamb slices, Chinese beef/fish balls, lettuce, watercrest, shrimps etc. A lot of people, especially Caucasians, find this unsanitized. That is why Taiwanese invented individual hot potting. A hot pot for each person, so you only pick your own food out of the bowl. My family have never tried individual hot pot, so I went with my parents to Pacific Mall.

As usual, parking was hell, but we managed to find one. The place was pretty empty, but at Pacific Mall, 12:00am is the new 9:00 pm. We were seated at a 4-people table, but the tablet was awful! There were still bits of food left from the previous people. We informed the waiter, and he wiped it down for us, but I could still see some grease marks on it. Note to self: do not put elbows on table.

The idea is to choose what soup base you want, what drinks you want and what all-you-can-eat ingredients you want. They have a variety of soup base, but only a few ones included with the price. All other ones you have to pay extra. They have an average list of ingredients. In fact, you only seafood choice, shrimps. We placed our order and awaited the food.

Everything came pretty quickly, but apparently, soy milk, honey tea and iced tea are self-served. And they tasted like they were watered down. Also, the floor was REALLY slippery. I almost fell down a couple of times went I went to get sauces. The food were okay. The more expensive ingredients we only got one for each person, while the cheaper ingredients we got a pile. They have a dessert place, but they only had sesame balls, which is actually a dim sum, not a dessert. The waiters were not professionals, but they all worked really hard.

The one aspect I liked about individual hotpot was how you could make your own sauce. They have different sauces and different ingredients like peanut, sesame, oyster, chili, satay, garlic bits, green onion bits etc. I made this awesome sauce with peanut, satay and a little bit of chili bits. It was a lot of fun. I'm like a 12 year old. But one aspect I didn't like was that a lot of the signs only had Chinese characters, which did not help the non-Chinese speaking crowd. I had a couple of people asking me about the sauces.

By around 7:30, the place started to get busy. There was a line at the doors. This couple was sitting at the table next to us. It was a 6-people table, and the waiter asked them if they could adjust their eating arrangement (they were sitting side by side instead of across each other, and they spreaded their food around the table). The guy told the waiter rudely that he didn't want to sit with anyone at the table, so the waiter had to go and informed the waiting people that they had to wait a bit. The four people got angry and left. This happened two more times. The two people caused the shop 3 postential profit! That made me so mad! How can people be that incosiderate?

We left after one and half hour because they had a 2-hour limit and a lot of people were waiting. The service was average, but they were understaffed and all worked very hard. The food was average, but the place was poorly ran and poorly designed. Better ventilation is needed for the place, and they need to clean the floor periodically or at least get non-tile floors. Sauces and supplies needed to be replenished periodically as well. It will be a LONG time before I go back.