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| Getting the "noodle dance" performance |
When I was in Beijing around 2007, a local friend took me to Haidilao for hot pot. The most memorable part was the "noodle dance", where a guy in a tracksuit and cap doing a quasi ribbon dance with a stretched out piece of dough, making circles with it in the air and even snapping it at us. What a spectacle!
Many years later I went to Haidilao again for my birthday and they gave me a paper crown to wear and had a blindingly bright LED sigh that said "Happy Birthday" in Chinese, Korean and English.
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| Enough food to eat? The perils of over-ordering |
Oh yes we had the noodle dance again! This time with a vegetable-flavoured dough that was green!
The service here (for Canadian standards) is very attentive and friendly and the staff speak mostly Mandarin and English for non-Chinese speaking customers. If you are a member of Haidilao you get lots of freebies, like toys for the kids and we scored some Miffy hats!
The only problem with hot pot is always over-ordering the amount of food to eat. But before you even order there's a salad bar where you can get snacks like sliced oranges and apples, cherry tomatoes, congee and even shrimp chips!
At the same bar area there is an array of condiments to make your individual sauce with soy sauce, sesame paste, chilli oil, sesame oil, coriander, and vinegar, chopped chillis, minced garlic and spring onions.
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| Pork bone and mushroom soup bases |
Then ordering on a tablet one gets carried away ordering as you scroll down and forget what you've already picked out...
And then the food arrives via a feline-shaped robot and you're overwhelmed by the amount of dishes on the table!
Luckily Haidilao let us pack up the cooked and raw food -- we cooked the meat and put them in plastic containers and another for the soup base.
We were so full afterwards we didn't need to eat dinner! But we did try the soup and it was oh so good.
Until next year!
Haidilao
3204 West Broadway
Vancouver, BC
604 336 2588
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