A friend of mine is always on the lookout for good deals, and a couple of months ago told me he had found one.
At first I had thought it were an ala carte meal with 30%, 50% off etc.
But it turned out to be a buffet.
A hotpot buffet.
Which I can never say no to.
It has been a while since we've come to Happy Lamb Hotpot at Pacific Plaza on Scotts Road, and, to my surprise, there had been a bit of change.
Quite a good move, actually, because now instead of having to order your hotpot favorites dish by dish, you can go straight up to their self-help counters and take whatever you want, however much you want.
You don't have to worry about finishing an entire bowl of mushrooms if you don't feel like you want to.
You also don't need to worry that you've wasted food should you order a whole bowl of something only to find that you don't like it at all.
Now you can pick a single piece, eat it, go back take more, or go for other foods after.
To my great delight, I didn't have to think how many bowls of lettuce I wanted to have.
I could have as much as I wanted.
And I did.
Three bowls all.
I love vegetables in soup, and although I'm good with all the bai cai and cabbage and all the other kinds of vegetables, my favorite is lettuce- the big leaf green green ones.
There's something fun about dunking fresh green lettuce into your pot of soup and watching it boil into a soft, mushy, slurpy piece of vegetable.
There's something comforting about feeling the soft crunch of lettuce in your mouth mixed with the hearty, delicious flavors of soup and feel it burst into your mouth as you chew.
So in I am with these fresh big green lettuce leaves that I can go through the entire buffet eating nothing else but them all.
But that wouldn't do much justice to the selection of meats, which not only does Happy Lamb have a lot of, they're all served fresh, served, perfectly sliced, and good.
There's never been a time when the meat here is served up looking like someone just dunked a whole chonk of frozen slices onto the plate.
Neither has there ever been a time when the meat here is so frozen you still see the ice on the top of the meat when they bring it out.
Nope, everything slides off easily as you dunk it into the soup, which, by the way, out of several flavors, including tomato, hot and sour, and mala, we chose the herbal Yangsheng Original Flavor.
I like seeing the red dates and the other herbs bobbing about inside.
I am someone who prefers her meats thin and quick to cook, so it were plates of shabu-shabu styled meat that we got today.
I love how some of them came so neatly and prettily rolled up on their rectangular platter whilst others came served in this huge a** glass of a round plate laid out like they were petals of a flower.
What made it even more charming was how symmetrical the pieces had been laid out. Whoever did it had made sure they were carefully laid out with all the narrow parts of marbling in the center and the wider parts at the end.
This wasn't some haphazard slipshod way of serving food.
This was aesthetic whetting your appetite even before your soup got boiled.
I'm trying to remember just what we had though.
Might have been pork belly, might have been a bit of lamb.
Or was it beef....
The meat was tender, and the soup coated it so full of strong taste that it was a joy eating slice after slice- as it were- without needing any dipping sauce at all.
This is one great thing about the hotpot of Happy Lamb by the way.
So full of taste is their soup base that they proudly tell you you don't need any dipping sauce at all.
Today though we got ourselves some little prawns.
Why, I don't know, we just felt like it be great fun fishing them small little pieces out from the huge, gigantic pot.
It was much easier to find the heart-shaped cheese tofus and the cone-shaped fish cakes that I'd dropped inside.
Of course I really ought to have had them arranged prettily on a plate.
But I didn't think I was going to take a picture, so I simply chucked them all in and left them there.
I think we ate a lot of these cheese tofu.
We also ate a lot of these stringy-looking green strips that seemed to have some sort of seasoning on them.
They're clean-tasting, with a feel of the vegetable, and very crunchy.
But I still don't know what they are.
All in all, as to be expected of Happy Lamb's standards, it was a good meal.
I had a fine time with the soup, the meat that got cooked in the soup, my heaps of lettuce vegetables and all the little small side dishes that I'd seen before, heard of, but had never had the chance to try.
We ended off the meal with a serving of free flow soft serve ice cream.
My friend had matcha.
I took the strawberry.