Huo Yi Hot Pot

Summary

It seems when it comes to hot pot, East Village is a thriving destination. Usually people try to go to 99 Favor Taste because it also has grillable BBQ meats in addition to hot pots. When people don’t have reservations and are quoted a 2 hour wait time, the next logical option is to look for another hot pot place which just happens to be this place since it’s a few streets down.

First and foremost this is an all you can eat hot pot place. Only the non-alcoholic drinks are included, so be wary of grabbing the alcoholic sakes. We got dinged $16 per small bottle because someone in my party went a little too happy due to a lack of transparency from the wait staff.

There are a plethora of soup bases here to choose from. Be warned though, the mild spicy soups are still pretty hot. I can just imagine how spicy the medium is. Because we were with our friends, they got some type of normal beef broth, and we got the spicy (supposed to mild) sour cabbage with pork. The broth was not sour at all like what I’ve had before, so I was pretty disappointed.

They give you this huge paper checklist of assorted meats and sides to choose from. If you are hungry and don’t want to wait, make sure you order multiples. The service here is a hit or miss (mostly miss for us on this night). I had to flag the wait staff down to take our orders, and it takes them a little time to assemble the array of things.

The mainstream meat quality here is about standard for a typical hot pot place in New York City. The meats are served thinly shaved, similar to how bacon strips are. We did not try any innards, so I have no idea how the quality of those are. It’s nice that this place also has noodles for the closure, and it does have a lot of choices to pick from.

For dipping sauces, there’s a sauce station in the back with all your typical standard ingredients, or if you look above the glass there are some premade sauces. Behind that there’s an ice cream station where you can scoop your own.

In the end, the food was alright. It’s interesting that the non-alcoholic beverages were free, but I wish there was better communication about how expensive the alcoholic ones were.

The service though was pretty bad. The fact you have to flag wait staff down is something that’s not great. We’ve had a large stack empty trays on our table, but no one really cleared them out until you flagged them down. We also had to ask for the menu multiple times to order more items.

Final Verdict

It’s a decent alternative to 99 Favor Taste for hot pot. You can walk in without reservations pretty easily, but I think 99 Favor Taste is still much better.

Yelp Jabs

Which I assumed their quality of food would be better. WRONG, the ingredients are frozen: baby corn, dumpling and a few other things. The corn tasted soggy and watery.

I would be surprised if a restaurant served fresh dumplings for hot pot. This person probably has never had hot pot before, so feel free to throw their review in the trash.

TO TOP IT ALL OFF, one of us got a stomach ache right away and hasn’t stop using the bathroom!

Here’s the thing with hot pot. Because it’s make your own, always make sure the broth is boiling before taking out food. Next, use the broiling broth to kill germs off your chopsticks as you handle raw foods. Lastly, be cautious about ordering more exotic things (e.g. intestines, liver, etc) that can be more prone to cause sickness especially if you don’t know how to cook it.