To Hot Pot: Chongqing Style Hot Pot in Richmond

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To Hot Pot is the newest hot pot restaurant to open up in Central Richmond. It is located in the same plaza as Dinesty. They specialize in Chongqing style hot pot.

We were invited by Chopstick Fest to have a sneak preview of what To Hot Pot offers to their customers.

It’s very new, so nothing exists online when we were searching this place up.

Interior

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This space is huge! This is the main dining area with tons of hot pots. They even have other areas as well for larger groups for more private dining.

We love the table that we sat at since it has hooks for your purses. Love it.

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Tracking Card

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This little electronic card tracks what you order for your hot pot.

The instructions on the card say:

Pick your soup, bring your card to the counter
Pick your dishes freely
Choose your drink, billed automatically
Pay bill with card

Not the best explanation, but there are staff to help guide you through the process.

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Ordering

There is a digital screen where you can make your selection of drinks, soup base and other options. It’s a fairly strange process to me to have servers around, the digital screen to order with the electronic card, then you also have to go pick up what you want from the fridges.

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At the far end of the room are these small fridges were you can pick and choose what you want for your meal. Each dish costs money, but you have no idea how much until you tap your card at the end for the total.

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You’ll find vegetables, meat, tofu, noodles, and other items that you would typically add to the hot pot. Each dish has an RFID chip, so they can track what items you grabbed.

You place your tray of items on this electronic table, it tabulates and you tap your card.

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Mix your own sauce

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I love the sauce bar since they have so many options for you to make the perfect sauce thats tailored to your taste buds.

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With so many options, there are lots to choose from, but there are only Chinese descriptions for the ingredients, so for only English speakers like me, we accidentally got black vinegar instead of soy sauce.

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They also had a small area for fruits and picked vegetables. You can grab as much as you want.

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Drinks

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Tea is free of charge, but they do have a good range of drinks to accompany the hot pot meal.

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Plum Juice is a classic item, but it’s not for everyone. For me it’s something that I’ve grew up drinking, so it don’t notice the flavours too much. To others it can taste like a light BBQ sauce.

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Winter melon juice was another item that our group loved.

Hot Pot

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We got the two soup bases – Pork Rib Soup and the spicy Chong Qing Style. They also have a special nine combo soup base option that looks pretty cool too.

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The spicy Chong Qing broth was very hot for our standards. According to the restaurant, some customers don’t have an issue with it. I usually find the spicy broth is great for cooking meat.

The Pork Rib broth was very nice and flavourful. Great for vegetables, noodles, seafood and tofu.

Veggies

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Veggie platter comes with an array of veggies that go well in the hot pot.

Mushroom platter comes with a variety of mushrooms from enoki to oyster mushrooms.

Meat

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Pork Belly is always a delicious meat to choose.

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Meatball Platter has 4 types of meat balls with 3 each. Beef, lamb and fish I think.

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The premium meats will arrive at the tables on nicer dishes, but there are a few cheaper meat options in the fridge like the pork jowl.

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All the other dishes may not fit on the table, for us, we ordered so much that it started to overflow the table, so they have these special racks for the extra dishes.

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