A friend thought it would be fun to go try this place at the Bugis area on the Liang Seah Street side.
It had been featured on Tiktok and IG, he said, and the videos made the food look extra nice.
I was partial.
It isn't that I don't like claypot.
It is that I don't know which claypot to like.
Many people tell me that there's nothing more comforting than a steaming hot dish simmering in a solid claypot, and to that, I definitely agree. Except that the dish inside the pot is of greater importance, and more often than not, I have no idea just what dish I ought to have.
There're a lot of dishes to be had here at Fat Bird Chicken Hotpot, particularly their Signatures, which include Fragrant Chicken Hotpot, Mushroom Herbs Chicken Pot, Pork Rib Pot and Beef Brisket Pot. There was also a Bullfrog Pot, the likes of which are popular at many a claypot porridge place.
These here are just the signatures.
Their list of ala carte, on the other hand, is tremendously long.
There're dishes like Herbal Prawn Claypot, Lychee Pork, Pork Floss Eggplant, Egg Yolk Coated Corn, Sichuan Hand Shredded Cabbage, San Bei Chicken, and dishes like Sizzling Braised Fish Claypot.
I don't really know what it was we ordered today, but pictures show that all three dishes we had were spicy.
There was, if I'm not wrong, a dish of tofu- the Sichuan Mala Tofu- where the cubes were big and soft and the gravy was a thick, spicy soup bright red to the eye and bright hot on the tongue.
The tofu here belonged to the stewed style, so the texture was a little less pong pong and mushy than it were elsewhere, but the cubes were big, tasty, and it felt like I were having it with soup.
The other dish, I think, was either beef or lamb.
I don't know which was which.
Might have been the Sichuan Double Cooked Pork Slices, or maybe the Xinjiang Lamb with Cumin and Chilies.
This doesn't look like San Bei Chicken.
And I don't think we'd gone for any of the Signature Dishes this afternoon either.
What's funny is that whilst I might not be able to remember which dish is which, or even which meat is which (I don't know how to differentiate between beef and lamb) but I can certainly remember how spicy each dish was, in particular the last one at the bottom.
So spicy was it that whilst most meats don't have the spice adhered to them, this one, it did. The gravy stuck to the tender meat, went into the crevices, so much so that biting into each individual piece made you feel like you were eating a wee bit of chili at the same time.
The parsley (or is it coriander) really helped though.
This is a bitter vegetable, mind, but a very different sensation one gets when eaten with spice this powerful. So rich was the sauce that I think I wrapped each slice of beef with one piece of coriander and ate it both together.
My favorite dish was probably the second one you see here.
It might well have been the lamb- I really cannot differentiate between one and the other- but I know the meat was tender and moist, full of flavor, and far from the dry, tasteless meat I had (quietly) thought it would be.
There'll be more dishes that I'll want to try the next time I come.
The Stout Flavored Pork, the Lychee Pork and the Deep Fried Sticky Rice Cake with Black Sesame sounded interesting.
I've not tried lychee with pork before, I've not tried how stout tastes when cooked with meats, and I want to know how the sticky rice cake with sesame looks like, tastes like.