HoChiak Steamboat @ Kuchai Lama

I don’t know about you, but I find few things more gratifying than an intense sweat festival over a giant hot pot of Malat .. i.e. Sichuan Hot Peppers.

It is through numbing pain, that one can truly give thanks for the food. Oh yes indeed.. Sichuan malat is not for the faint hearted.  It can destroy loo’s… it can hurt you. But just like the numbing joys of drugs, you keep going back for more. There can be no highs, without the lows. No pleasure without pain.

Of course then, at Ho Chiak, it’s a no brainer that we order the Malat option, as well as the milky herbal option for our steamboat. A no brainer whatsoever.

It’s probably a good idea, to start with the most benign looking soup, and work your way to the crimson. Otherwise, your tongue is numb and such things like a subtle herbal soup would be lost to your throbbing, inflamed tastebuds anyway.

Ying and Yang! 

We select a nice mix of BBQ items (grilled) as well as raw seafood, meat, and vegetables for our hotpot. The plan was to go half in the mild, and the rest in the raging malat quadrant.

fish paste (yue wat)

Squid

 stuffed crab meat

Well, as it turns out, the Malat side of things were not up to expectation. We had expected it to be way more spicy. And while the herbal soup was nice, it lacked oomph till much later, once all the seafood had sweetened it up. At least there was low MSG and we didn’t feel thirsty after.

The seafood was delicious. I loved the Fish Maw, and the fish paste (yue wat). The meat balls were divine too, as they had been stuffed with some sort of mince. From the BBQ items, I liked the skewered lamb. We had some stuffed crabs too, but these turned out to be rather mushy. Definitely go for the quails eggs – tiny but super yummy.

All in all, a fun experience. We need to go back to try more items on the menu as we only scratched the surface.