This place- located at a row of shop houses in the northeast at the junction of Upper Serangoon Road and Boundary Road- came recommended.
Highly recommended- in fact- because (someone) wanted to have laksa hotpot, and the previous place elsewhere had been pricey, awkward and short of stellar.
The soup is of utmost importance when it comes to laksa hotpot.
Have a baseless, bland, watery concoction that tastes like something salvaged from the seasoning packets of instant noodles and I'm not going to ever turn up again. If I'm going to risk getting body heatiness for dunking all that meat in soup, you can be sure I want my soup to taste good.
Thank goodness the soup at this place is way thicker, tastier and overall better.
They might have used the base (for all I know and I wasn't going to ask) but at least it was thicker, and didn't taste like they had dumped a ton of packet seasoning into a pot of water.
We were careful with our selections. Laksa offers one a very distinctive taste when it comes to food pairings, and you won't really know what goes well with the flavour until you cook it and eat it. A fail safe is seafood- fish slices or prawns or fish cakes or fish balls- but meats like beef and pork can go pretty well too.
Beef slices took the bulk of all the meats for the day and we took a couple portions of pork too. There was going to be chicken, but then we decided that since there was har cheong gai (prawn paste chicken) on the menu, we'd go for that instead. The beef was good. The laksa didn't overwhelm the taste so you got the beef, and you got the spice plus coconut and all.
Seafood would most certainly have been a better choice but because I didn't want to fill up on fish balls and cuttlefish balls (even though they're an absolute fave of mine) so skipped out on them instead. Wait, maybe I did take one, or two fish balls... or was it the cuttlefish balls....?
There were the vegetables- of course- one can't do without vegetables when it comes to hotpot- and the portions included seaweed, cabbage, mushrooms and corn. Why I chose the corn I have no idea- couldn't taste anything with all the spice going on- but cabbage and seaweed went perfectly well with all the chili and the coconut. I love cabbage with hotpot. The veggies get all soft and mushy and slurpy with the soup. And it doesn't matter what soup base you have, dropping in lots of seaweed will grant you the distinct umami taste adding just that bit of oomph to your food.
Of course, one mustn't forget the dipping sauces. Hotpot in Singapore tends to grant you the usual sauces of chili, fish oil, soy sauce, more chili, salt, sugar, sesame seeds, peanut sauce, sesame sauce, sesame oil, chili flakes, spring onions and parsley. Here they had all of these, and so I took a bowl of sesame sauce dribbled with sesame oil and a handful of parsley.
All in all it was a fantastic meal.
The serving portions were adequate, the buffet portions were nicely presented and fresh, we had drink selections of bottled oolong tea, soft drinks, and/or lime juice, they weren't stingy in their quantity and variety, and there was dessert in the form of ice cream. Cookies and cream it was for me (tasted a lil bit funny though), chocolate for my Co-Diner (much wiser a choice, honestly!)