A few skating friends and I decided to have a little celebration for the Lunar New Year with dinner at a hot pot restaurant. To me, hot pot is great comfort food when the mercury dips. Besides, the interactive and communal aspect of this eating style is great fun for a group dinner. Interestingly enough, I'm actually the only hot pot veteran in our group. Some of us never tried hot pot before and some only enjoyed it at home. After asking for recommendations from friends and family, we finally decided on Hot Pot King in Markham. Personally, I'm a little picky about hot pot restaurants. Most of these places are all-you-can-eat so the variety and freshness of ingredients can make or break the experience. However, more importantly, I want the place to be clean!!! I've seen some dubious hot pot restaurants before so cleanliness (or at least the appearance of cleanliness) matters to me.
Hot Pot King fits the above description well. Not only that, the service is excellent for a Chinese restaurant. The self-served sauce and soup base station is a nice touch. My friends and I had a blast trying to create dipping sauces to our own liking. The best part though, was the pot-to-diner ratio. Between our group of 6, we had two pots containing four kinds of broths and a Korean-style grill. This means each of us could easily access some cooking utensil without having to reach far.
Having hot pot dinner with 5 athletic guys is certainly very different than any of my previous hot pot experience. 85% of the food we ordered were protein!!! I was somewhat expecting the meal to progress from protein (meat & seafood & dumplings) to vegetables (leafy greens, turnips, taro, mushrooms) to starches (noodles). However, by the time we got through all the meat and seafood that we ordered, we were already too stuffed for much else. That's not to say we didn't eat much...we just ate a lot of meat!
Creativity was never something that I would typically associate with hot pot dinner but ML taught me something new today. He took an egg from the sauce station and cracked it into a groove of the grill. I didn't expect the egg would come out in one piece but apparently, all the grease and juice from the grilling meat "seasoned" the grill well enough for the egg to cook to perfection. Along with some grilled sausage and poached bean curd, ML created his version of eggs benedict, hot pot style. I bow to his innovative spirit and sense of adventure.
Lunar new year is a time to celebrate with good friends and good food. I must say we had both of them aplenty tonight. Pictures are available here.
Hot Pot King (Google Map)
146 Old Kennedy Road
Markham, Ontario, Canada
+1 905 477 0919
