2011 Off to a good start with a little lamb

Ok ... sometimes all it takes is a simple short text and before you know it you're tucking into something delicious and enjoying scintillating company. And what better way to start the year off than with a hearty hotpot meal.

When we bandied the idea of having dinner, DV was craving himself some steamboat. We eugoogle-ised steamboat melbourne and clicked on the ADOR link which gave us a long list with ratings. Unfortunately most of these referred to hotpot styles where everything is prepared for you and served in a pot! We were looking for the Chinese style steamboat which provides you the option to cook the ingredients yourself.

We thought we had lucked onto First Choice as the blurb mentioned Taiwenese Hot Pot which we mistakenly took to mean the Chinese style steamboat and it had a great rating. But we had to make our apologies and leave for a better option.

Not really knowing where else to go, DV liked the look of Little Lamb which advertised Mongolian hotpot. When we looked in we realised that it was as good an approximation of the Chinese Steamboat as ever and the place smellt inviting.

So we took a chance and sat down to one of the yummiest Asian dinners we have had together in a long time. We ordered:

Thinly Sliced Beef Brisket
Squid
Beef balls
Chai Sim
Chinese Cabbage
Fish
Black Fungus
Fresh Tofu
Tofu sticks

And we asked for a split hot and spicy and normal stock hotpot.

 
Our meal came with 3 different sauces:

Bog standard Chilli sauce
Garlic Sauce - heaven!
Chive Sauce - which DV hated and me and M absolutely adored.

In fact I had a mixture of all 3 in my dipping plate and if I could bottle this blended mess and sell it, I reckoned I'd build an entire retail empire on it alone.

Our friendly waittress was the cutest thing, but she came across as being quite pushy in terms of trying to get us to order more. Initially I thought she was working on commission, or for a frighteningly severe Tai Tai who whipped her and shoved herin the cupboard if she didn't maintain her quota of food ordered. As it turned out, we had inadvertently ordered the all you can eat buffet hotpot for $25 a head. Which meant that everything we ticked on the ordering sheet would have been included in the price. So she was encouraging us to scam as much as we could!!! Bless her little heart. She even said at the end when we asked for the bill that we should have ordered something cheaper since we weren't eating as much. Better not let Madam Tai Tai know!!

I believe there are a couple of other Little Lambs around the traps but I can recommend the Box Hill branch for good service and great food.

I think its a fantastic excuse for a regular catchup.

PS what was the one thing we didn't have at Little Lamb ... you guessed it! Little Lamb!