Little Lamb Hot Pot

I'm getting a little bored with writing so I'm going to keep it brief and rely on pictures to describe dinner at Little Lamb on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Little Lamb is a specialist hot pot restaurant but if you're looking for the Lancashire variety then you'll be disappointed. By hot pot, I mean what the Cantonese call ‘daa bin lou’, Mandarin speakers call ‘huo guo’, and what the Japanese know as ‘shabu-shabu’. It's also commonly known as 'steamboat'.

The hot pot here is the common or garden Chinese variety. This is despite Little Lamb's misleading claim that it's a Mongolian & Chinese restaurant. No matter what you call it and what style you go for, hot pot makes for a fun and filling meal. 

Ordering is simple here as you use a tick sheet akin to those found in dim sum restaurants. You can go a la carte but I recommend going for the £20/head set meal (min. 2 persons), where you choose a soup base and five dishes per person. Between the two of us, we saved around a tenner ordering this way.

For the soup base, we went 'yin-yang' with a nourishing herbal tonic and a special spicy soup, into which the assorted meat, seafood, vegetables, mushrooms and noodles are cooked. The faint hearted should beware of the Sichuan-style spicy soup.

The above photos show off the beef, crab, prawns and Fuzhou-style fishballs. Apologies for the lack of photos of the other dishes but my attention drifted towards cooking and eating. In fact, the food was so good that I nearly forgot to take a photo of the noodles. Mind you, there wasn't much of the fensi or mung bean vermicelli left by the time I remembered.

I'd forgotten how much fun, hot pot is and if you don't mind cooking your own dinner then I strongly recommend Little Lamb. I'm also glad that my dining companion, Bellaphon enjoyed it. You should read his write-up, especially if you want to know what else we ate and what it looked like.