Steamboat

In 2007 my mum, brother and I traveled to Thailand to visit my dad (who lives in china). While there we discovered the steamboat at MK restaurant in the MBK shopping centre. It was so cheap and so tasty and we left absolutely stuffed! I remember we managed to feed the 5 of us for 50 bucks including drinks and the mountain of spring rolls and roasted duck (if you ever visit this restaurant you MUST try the duck, its TDF!). But since returning to Australia we haven't been able to find a restaurant that specialises in steamboat/hotpot until now! On one of my very lonely nights of reading food blogs i came across a review of go-in hotpot train on Hindley street so tonight, not revealing where we were going, I took my family there and wow were they excited!

It was a lot different to the MK's because it was set up like a sushi train but there was no sushi, instead an array of vegetables and noodles were rotating the table. We took our seats and chose our soup flavour (I chose hot and spicy schezchuan beef) and then our meat as they did not appear along the conveyor belt for OH&S reasons presumably. As each weird vegetable floated past we debated over what it could be and then, without agreeing on an answer, chucked it into our soup pots to trial.

 I ended up trying lotus root which was actually pretty tasty and interesting, my soup was super spicy though, can you see all those chillies?

My favourite things that i put into my soup were the mushrooms and deep-fried tofu squares which sucked up all the soup flavours.

Nice soothing Sugar cane drink to cool the pallet (SUPER SWEET)

 There was 3 options for drinks, the sugar cane, herbal tea and plum juice. We got the sugar cane to start which was sickly sweet and then we got the plum juice, but for some strange reason that tasted like smoky bbq sauce, so we didnt end up finishing that one...

My mum was grabbing things left right and centre to test out and of course when given the option of meats she chose all 3 types, needless to say my brother and boyfriend demolished the meat stack pretty quickly while mum and me smashed the veggies.

All in all it was a very lovely, reasonably cheap (under $20 ea) eat out. However, although the hotpot 'train' idea is brilliant, it meant that i had to yell across my brother and boyfriend to my mum to have a conversation with her, i would have preferred to be seated facing my family members, which there was an option to do, but those 2 tables were taken :(

Im now going to go for a hot shower and then take my full little belly off to bed!

Goodnight my pretties

Beth xo