Hot Pot on Yonge Chinese Cuisine located at 5441 Yonge Street in North York

Hot pot is always fun!  It’s when you gather with some friends or family and place lots of raw and uncooked food into a boiling pot to eat together!  I think the origin of this Chinese cuisine started when people wanted to keep their food hot while eating.  For that reason, hot pot is especially common during the winter months.  

Six of us dined at Hot Pot on Yonge Chinese Cuisine (小肥牛, [translates as “little fat cow”]) on a Saturday evening two weekends ago.  I’ve walked by this place many times before when walking down Yonge Street and it’s right next to many other restaurants like Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu.  It’s a Chinese-staffed restaurant in a predominantly Korean-based area.

Typical hot pot set up: sauce bowl, plate for the food, wooden chopsticks, and a ladle to scoop up your hot food 🙂

Menu of all the soup bases, sauces, snacks, drinks, and all you can eat items that you can choose from

We chose our soup base for the two pots that were on our table; parsley & preserved egg broth on one side and satay broth on the other.  We also chose the condiments that we wanted in our sauce bowls.  It was an all-you-can-eat affair, so after that, you can choose any of the ingredients from the list that they have and they bring it to you.  They served everything from fish balls, beef balls, veggies, raw beef, chicken, lamb, seafood like shrimp, mussels, squid, dumplings, tofu, and more!  Unlike some hot pot places that bring you a specific number of items that you request for, here, they bring you enough of the item for all the people at your table.  The staff did say that if there was anything left on the table that we didn’t use, it was okay, and we wouldn’t be charged for it.  This approach has its pros and cons, I believe, compared to other restaurants where you order by number.

You fill this sheet in for your table and they bring all the individual small plates for you to mix your sauce in (some other restaurants will bring you a “sauce station” for you to mix everything)

Then you fill in this other little sheet (as many  sheets as you want) to ask for the items that you want to cook in your hot pot

While making the sauces, they also served us a fried fish cake to eat (I wondered if this was to make us feel full already so we wouldn’t order too much… lol)

Parsley & preserved egg broth on the left and satay broth on the right

We spent the rest of our night boiling away and dipping the raw meats into the hot pots to cook or dumping lots of food into the pots and then retrieving it later to eat.  It was fun!

They brought us all these individual plates of soy sauce, green onions, fried garlic, etc. for us to customize our sauce bowls

What mine contained and what it looked like after I mixed everything together; I overdid it haha

I think I overdid my sauce bowl that night because I added too many condiments into it (I was trying to re-make the amazing sauce bowl that I assembled during a recent hot pot night).  Nevertheless, I loved the food, especially the lamb.  It was so good!!  To our surprise, we also found that the sausage was good, as well as the potato noodles!  We got a few items in our dishes that we didn’t ask for, but it turned out to be delicious.  Oh, and I cooked a lot of the seaweed/kelp that night to eat.  It was so good!

Lamb, chicken, and beef!

What I loved about the staff here was that they were all extremely efficient and fast with all of our orders and requests.  Once we needed something and asked, the staff would literally get it to us right away.  It was so impressive (and rare) to see such efficient service that was attentive and caring.  I loved it!  They also cleared empty dishes off of our table almost immediately when they saw that we were done with the plate.  Amazing!

Once the pot boils, everything is up for grabs haha

Yum! So much selection!

The squid was really good! There was a lot of selection of tofus too

The chopped up pieces of sausage were SURPRISINGLY delicious (joke word of the night) XD

Seafood! It’s not often that I have seafood at hot hots! I loved the seaweed and kelp. I ate so much of it!

All you can eat for $26.99 per person

This was how full the restaurant got from the time we were there from 5:45 to 8 p.m. ish

Dessert time: Chinese herbal jelly & mango pudding

After almost two hours of cooking and eating, we were full and the table was cleared.  It was time for desserts!  There were Chinese herbal jelly and mango pudding to choose from on their menu.  I ordered one of each. 😀  The mango pudding tasted all right but the Chinese herbal jelly was really good!  It was a little more bitter than most places might serve it, but I like it when it tastes bitter.

There is another location called 小肥羊 “little fat sheep”. I wonder if the two are related?

Overall, it was a lovely night of dining and hot potting!  Thanks to Gen for organizing the night. 🙂  Have you been to this place before for hot pot?  Any other places that you can recommend in the city that are good for hot pot?