Little Lamb Hot Pot

As you may or may not know, depending on how long you've been reading my meager blog posts, the Hart's take an annual trip to Chicago's Chinatown. Typically we go to the Triple Crown restaurant for dim sum, which is incredible! Unfortunately, this year we were tight on time and the wait for a table was too long, but there are plenty of options in Chinatown so all we had to do was pick one. Mama Hart choose Little Lamb Hot Pot located at 2201 S. Wentworth Ave, Chicago, IL 60616 and boy was it an experience!




Little Lamb Hot Pot




Décor: good. The restaurant is sort of generic for the area. The booths are red, the walls are maroon and bamboo paneled. There's one Asian-themed wall decoration. All together it just looks like any other restaurant in Chinatown.




Food appearance: good. Being the hot pot novices we are/were, we weren't sure what to make of this restaurant at all. We are seated at a small round table with an electric heating element in the middle and weren't really sure what to make of it. Do we share? Do they have anything that isn't soup? HOW DOES THIS WORK? Well, as it turns out, you cook your own food at your heating element -- think of a popular chain fondue restaurant. The seafood, meat and vegetables are brought out to you raw and void of seasonings and you cook them yourself in your broth-filled hot pot. The meat and seafood looked fresh, everything was still red/pink. That means fresh, right? The vegetables were cleaned and the broth(s) we chose were flavorful.




Food taste: good. The interesting thing about this hot pot concept is all the flavor is really up to you. The menu allows you to choose up to two broths per hot pot, you select your own varieties of meat, seafoods and vegetables and you create your own sauce at their sauce bar. We chose two broths (one spicy one mild), angus beef, rib tips, whole shrimp, a variety of vegetables and a few dumplings to create our hot pot. My sauces were chile oil and peanuts and Sriracha and cilantro (this sauce was pretty awesome, I ate it as a salad).




Service: poor. I feel sort of guilty to rate the service as poor but the server showed up at the beginning to take our drink order, gave us very minimal instruction as to how to order said hot pot, and then never returned until it came time to pay. I'm not sure if this is a cultural phenomenon, language barrier, or I just have a different idea as to what good service should look like but I wasn't very impressed.




Cleanliness: poor. The sneeze guard for the sauce station desperately needed to be cleaned, although the sauces and spices contained in it appeared to be fresh and the floor was screaming that it needed to be cleaned. All together it just didn't look very sanitary. However, the tables were clean, the serve ware was clean and the meats were fresh and vegetables cleaned.




Total: 8/15




If you ignore the service and the possible sanitation issues, the hot pot was actually very tasty and I would probably go again but I do have a few pointers so you look less ridiculous and make a smaller mess of the table than we did:




1) know that this is all family style so you should all agree on what you'd like to eat;


2) DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LEAVE THE UTENSILS IN THE HOT POT BROTH, we made this mistake (several times) and ended up having to fish the utensils out of the bottom of the broth;


3) take turns dipping things into the broth, on more than one occasion, I was splashed with boiling hot broth because someone or another was fighting over the utensils or what was on them;


4) if you order a vegetable with a tougher stalk (bok choy, Chinese broccoli, etc.) put it in your broth first because it takes longer to cook than the meats;


5) if you order noodles put them in your individual bowl and then pour broth over it, it's much easier than fishing for noodles in a pot of boiling broth with tongs;


6) if you order dumplings, they will float to the top when they're ready, don't fish for them, refer to "3" for clarification;


7) unless you REALLY like the taste of liquid smoke, do not order the plum juice.




If I return to Little Lamb Hot Pot, I will follow my own advice and hopefully have a more pleasurable experience.