This hotpot here has to be one of the best discoveries we'd ever made in the past year.
No doubt we haven't had chance to have it a lot this year- not yet- but seeing these pictures here make me glad I have had the opportunity, and that I'll continue to have.
Paradise Hotpot- under the Canton Paradise Group- has a couple of outlets distributed all over the island. Offhand I don't remember exactly how many there are, or where they all are, but there's one at Vivocity, there's one at Punggol Coast, and there's one at Bedok Mall.
Bedok Mall is the one we frequent.
Not just because it's convenient (although it is) but maybe the place is familiar, I have this thing for Bedok Town Center, and I'm just so glad that they have an outlet here.
Paradise Hotpot makes for one of the most enjoyable dining experiences that I have had in recent date.
Not because I am biased towards hotpots- which, yes, I am- but because there's an oomph about this place and its offerings that make the dining especially great to have.
You can say it's the cooked food.
You can say it's the variety of hotpot ingredients.
You can also say it is the kind of soups and meats and drinks, desserts that they have.
Everything and anything you wouldn't be wrong, but me being me, I'd say it be the cooked food that quietly wins over everything else.
See, it isn't difficult to offer hotpot ingredients, wide a variety as they are.
It is a bit harder, however, to offer cooked food in the theme of Hong Kong cuisine, and make it appetizing to all kinds of tastes and all kinds of palates.
But Paradise Hotpot does it rather well.
I don't remember all the selections they have, but certainly there is a fair amount of fun finger food in the form of chicken nuggets, fries, bean curd skins, popcorn chicken, spring rolls, some deep fried dim sum selections, scallops, mantous (with condensed milk!), and a variety of frozen bites that appeal to just about anyone and everyone.
If the deep-fried finger foods weren't your choice, there were other foods like the fried radish cake, and the heavier selections of fried noodles and fried rice.
Amongst the cooked food too there were the braised, the steamed, and the stewed, all of which were just as appealing to diners whom I saw helped themselves to the braised pork and the soup, the paus and crystal paus, siew mais and even curry fish balls.
My choice of the day were the curry fish balls, the siew mais, and the deep fried scallops.
Don't ask me why I took scallops two times.
Let's just say it's a childhood thing.
They were 25c- half of my daily 50c allowance when I was young.
Now they're thrown into a serving bowl for me to take all I want.
So, yes, I helped myself.
A buffet, much less a hotpot buffet, is a place where you can go get whatever you want and go have your favorites as much as you want without worrying that you'll overeat or overpay.
So, yes, I helped myself to my long-deprived childhood favorite of deep-fried scallops, my new-found favorite of curry fish balls, and lots and lots of vegetables.
Don't laugh at my choice of the veggies.
If there be one thing I have always liked, it is to have vegetables in soup.
Especially lettuce, cabbage, and anything green and leafy.
If there's lettuce, I take lettuce.
If there's Chinese cabbage, I take Chinese cabbage.
If there be none else but spinach, or nai bai- those kind that have small leaves with the big stems, I take them.
I love how vegetables soak up the soup, which, this afternoon, I chose the Teochew Style Soup Base.
The thing about this soup is that it's light, yet not so faintly flavored that you get no taste at all. Different people have different tastes. If mine be this one, light yet gentle with a flavor, others prefer stronger, more herbal types.
Like that which my friend chose- Cordycep Flower with Mushroom- which had the taste of herbs right from the start.
Of course, every base of soup becomes enhanced once you start dropping in the food. People say that prawns and baby lobsters make a soup sweet. For me and my friend, however, what we had today hovered between chicken and pork.
I think we chose pork more than we chose chicken.
And which, I have to say, I didn't mind.
Not one bit at all.
Pork belly slices, thin as they are, might not give that much chomp when it comes to the meal, but that means I get to go for more.
Exactly how many of them trays of meat we ordered this afternoon, I don't remember now, but there must have been at least seven, or eight between us both.
It was a consistent balance between dipping and eating and eating and dipping, a pattern which I didn't mind one bit at all.
There's something therapeutic when you have a hotpot meal that has been carefully calibrated, whether in the plates of vegetables you're taking, or whether you're deliberating if you should take carrots or mushrooms or more bean curd skin.
You find yourself at the counter studying carefully at all the vegetables, the four different kinds of noodles, the processed balls, the other kinds of vegetables, the other varieties of hotpot ingredients, and you wonder what you ought to have that your stomach can take them all.
There're those amongst us who are extremely healthy when it comes to their hotpot food.
I'm not that particular.
So even if there be times when I don't take their sauce- because I've got the Greek style yogurt with garlic powder, miso and all- it don't mean I don't eyeball their peanut sauce and sesame sauce and coriander and parsley.
Same thing too, it don't mean I won't go for the processed balls and all the other bouncy stuff simply because I've stuffed myself full with siew mais and fried radish cake and spring roll.
I still do.
This afternoon I decided I wanted the fun food of cheese tofu, so I got myself two, dunked them inside the pot, and let them bubble and boil.
Same way too for the cuttlefish balls and the quail eggs which I had originally not intended to take but somehow ended up taking anyway.
All in all it was a very pleasant, very satisfying meal.
It isn't just the soup that warms me up.
Nor is it the vegetables or the meats or any of the ingredients.
It is just how much variety there is one can have, whether it is in terms of the cooked food of which I can decide on portions, or whether it is in terms of dessert, which I too can decide on portions.
See, there're times when I just want two siew mais or four siew mais.
There are times when I want to have the crunch of a spring roll instead of a spoonful of fried rice.
Or maybe I want one pau, not three in a bamboo basket.
And Paradise Hotpot gives me these.
Likewise the dessert.
You can have a choice; which sort you want, however much you want.
Perhaps there be a day where I decide I want two bowls of tau fu fa or silky bean curd with colorful taro balls instead of ice cream.
Or I may, like this afternoon, just have the ice cream, no toppings whatsoever, and be happy with one single cup, no more.
