YX Mini Hot Pot
1/102-108 Hay St
Haymarket, Sydney
Hot pot is such a fun way to eat and you could also say that it is experiencing a ‘dinner and a show’ as you are the chef! Hot pot is a Chinese cooking method also known as soup food or steamboat. It is cooked at the dining table with a simmering pot of soup stock. You simply place the ingredients you want to cook into the soup and it cooks in the tasty broth. Everything is thinly sliced so it doesn’t take long!. They have cute booths everywhere here so you have quite a bit of privacy while you cook and eat.
So to start with, you need to choose two stocks for your mini hot pot. Everyone has their own pot here rather than the communal ones they have in other places. We decided to chose two different ‘stocks’ each. Sir had Oxtail Tomato and Pickled Fish and Mlady had Chicken and Mushroom.The stock pots each have separators in the middle so your combinations don’t mix together. It also means you can cook in both sides of your pot at once too. Twice as much! .The staff looked after us and made sure that the stock was constantly simmering and continually topped up.
All the food here is so beautifully prepared and presented. It’s almost food art and has a real wow factor when it arrives at the table. The Luxury Meat Combo Slices were so impressive. It had beef tender slices, premium sliced lamb, premium Wagyu beef slices and the stunning rose of matsuzaka pork. It was such a visually beautiful array of thinly sliced meats just waiting to be cooked and when we did cook them, they were cooked in next to no time.
The bamboo fungus filled with mashed shrimp was a very elegant dish. This arrived in glass tubes. Of course you slide them out of their individual glass tubes to cook them! They look spectacular when they arrive at the table and taste great too.
So what sauces do you use, you ask? Well there’s also a massive ‘spice station’ along an entire wall where you select whatever lovely spices ans sauces take your fancy. There’s no limit either and you can keep going back too. Decisions, decisions. After perusing we chose quite a few in separate bowls including chilli and barbecue.
You can choose veggies as well with your meal. Sir choose the very tasty potato noodles which resembled wide pasta when cooked and he also had the celtuce slices. Mlady loves her ‘greens’ and went with the bok choy and sliced pumpkin. We must mention the presentation of the boy choy. It looked so good in what we can only describe as a large sea-shell looking dish.
The Australian Paradise Prawn dish was yet another visually appealing serving. Just drop them in the stock and right before your eyes, you see the prawn change colour and it’s ready to be eaten almost instantly.
A fave of Mlady’s was the processed meatball combo, as it reminded her of Yum Cha - which she loves. This dish was made up of imitation crab claws, processed fish ball, processed fish tofu and lucky bag. We ate the lot - well everything except the flower garnish!
The meatball combo was another great mix with beef meatballs, pork meatballs with coriander, tender prawn balls and seaweed cuttlefish balls. Cooking these then dipping into one of your sauces - lovely! As with everything else, they cooked quickly and tasted great.
They do have a few dishes that aren’t destined for the hot pot. We started the meal nibbling on some amazing crispy pork pieces. In fact we couldn’t resist nibbling on these all through our meal.
We did manage to try dessert, two in fact. The fried rice cakes came stacked in a pile looking a bit like polenta chips. They were served with a nice brown sugar dipping sauce. The crispy outer and soft filling went so well with the thin sweet sauce.
The next dessert was fried buns with condensed milk. It sounded so simple yet these were divine and so hard to stop eating. They were lightly fried with a delicious donut-like consistency inside and dipping these into the condensed milk was mouthwatering.
The food at YX Mini Hot Pot is fresh, vibrant, and amazingly presented. It certainly does not take long to cook any of these wonderful dishes. You are the chef so you determine how you wish your food to be cooked. It is fun for couples and crowds and is interactive. If you’ve never tried this, you’re missing out. Give it a go. They help you if you’re new to it and you can go simple if you want too. They also have a full bar here too so you can sip a brew or some good wine as well.
YX Mini Hot Pot is upstairs from the street, but there is also a lift as well as stairs. They also have another level as well with private dining rooms. We had a look at them and they are perfect for groups, families, special occasions and even business groups. You get a private waiter there too! They have quite a few rooms and they handle different numbers of people in each room.
Sir and Mlady dined as guests of XY Mini Hot Pot. Special thanks to Amanda for arranging our visit and popping in to see us. Thank you also to Sunny and all the rest of the staff who looked after us on the night.