One of my cousins told me about the food offerings at Red Hill. I had heard about this place and walked past hundreds of times, but never thought to give it a try. However, my cousin said that she had the Hot Pot and that it was very good and well worth it as it is only $28 for all you can eat. So I decided to gather the whanau and go there to celebrate mine and Mulan’s birthday month.
Hot Pot is where there is soup on a table with a burner underneath keeping the hot pot hot. While you are sitting there, you cook the food you order in the boiling soup. The menu is very simple there are three different soup bases and you can have two in one hot pot with a divider in the middle. Also, there are numerous condiments you can order to have with your cooked food and different varieties of meat, seafood, vegetables and noodles
Hot Pot: Double Flavoured
As we were a table of eight, we basically ordered everything. The condiments are great and I ended up mixing a sauce of garlic, spring onions, chilli oil, sesame oil, sesame sauce and soy sauce. I really loved the sesame flavour and the garlic. Yummy.
So we had two hot pots going on the table and we had hot spicy and chicken soup base in both. The soup bases taste very different. I loved the hot and spicy side. It was so good but a bit of a tip, some foods should not be cooked in the hot spicy side as it soaks up all the oil and you really don’t want to be eating a lot of that.
Meat wise we order Chicken, Lamb and Beef. Although I like chicken, it was sliced so thinly that it just fell apart in the hot pot. Also, once you put it in, you cannot take anything out while it is cooking. The lamb was good but the real winner was the beef. Although slightly fatty. It was good because the fat had the flavour and the cut was good.
Seafood; we went with the squid tentacles, prawns and fish. the squid was really nice and I always love the texture and flavour. It works really well with hot pot. The fish was really nice and I always managed to cook it perfectly which was a real bonus. Don’t waste your time with the prawns as they are small and had the skins on them, so they were actually really hard to eat and not worth the effort.
Vegetables: We went with the fresh tofu which was really nice in the chicken stock. Dry bean curd, which is a more of a texture thing as it does not have a lot of flavour. Bok Choy is always good and lettuce is lovely when it is cooked in a hot pot for only a minute otherwise overcook it and it is terrible. Black fungus is always a treat and cauliflower is good but it takes a while to cook.
Carb wise; The potatoes surprisingly were really good. Although they take a while to cook as they soak up the flavour of the soup base so really good in the hot and spicy sauce bass. The rice cakes were really good and we ordered a lot of these. The egg noodles were always cooked on the chicken base soup side as were the rice noodles but were so good when you mixed them into your personalised sauce.
For $28 how can you say this is not a good deal. It is just so good. Interesting observation though. Red Hill has two obvious clientele on a Friday night. One is the Chinese, which visit there before 7 and go for the Hot Pot Buffet, as it is such a good deal. The other half is the crowd after 7pm, which are the University students who go for cheap Chinese and BYO. Red Hill does not offer Hot Pot after 7pm and it goes to it’s full a la carte menu and start karaoke at 9pm. We were there during the changeover and man it is just such a different place and I felt so old. I also hoped that I didn’t see some of my old students which I didn’t. Overall, a dam good place for all you can eat, very fun and well worth a try.
Address: 119 Manners Street, Te Aro, Wellington
Website: Red Hill Restaurant
Trencherman's Travels 