For my father-in-law’s birthday the Hubby and I recommended dinner at Fish Legend, a new Sichuan restaurant in First Markham Place (FMP) that opened this year. The restaurant specializes in stone pot fish, where a large stone pot (go figure) filled with broth and fresh fish is cooked at the table. My first encounter with this dish was in Mississauga and it’s a great experience for anyone who enjoys fish soup.

Atmosphere: As is the norm, parking at FMP was difficult to find and the restaurant was full of diners. Which most tables hosting a bowl of simmering soup, the steam built up inside the dining room. We were settled into a comfortable booth near the back of the restaurant. I liked how each table was separated by either a partition or aisle. Each table had a built in stove, similar to the grills at Korean BBQ restaurants. The restaurant decor was traditional with lots of wood, screens and Chinese style paintings.

Service: Like many restaurants in Markham, there were servers at Fish Legend to accommodate English, Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The Hubby spoke to the first server in English, who showed us to our table. Then I asked questions about the menu in Mandarin, and we asked for water in English. I found service felt more hectic and tense than it needed to be. There was a lot of staff manning the dining room but service was more reactive than proactive. The staff stood around, ready to be needed and then rushed to each table when they were called. Not bad, but it didn’t create a relaxed atmosphere with people rushing around. Each table was equipped with a call button.

Food: There was no menu, just an ordering sheet that had very limited descriptions. The two signature dishes at Fish Legend were Boiling Water Fish and Stone Pot Fish. This was the first time I saw the ability to customize the type of fish used for boiling water fish on a menu. Since we wanted to the try the stone pot, we decided against two fish entrees. Fish Legend also offers crayfish coated in a Sichuan sauce, a dish we had in Suzhou this summer. Next time, I’d love to try Fish Legend’s version.

For the Stone Pot Fish, the fish options were listed by price/lbs and we were given weights of the fish available by the server. We chose to go with a live catfish, which would be cooked bones and all. The fish soup continues to cook at the table and can be treated similar to hot pot. Fish Legend offers a selection of typical hot pot ingredients at $1.99-$2.49 per portion. We decided to try the tofu skin and handmade noodles.

The heavy pot full of fish and chilies. I found the fish fresh and tender but there were many bones that required caution while eating. The flavour of the broth was authentic, leaning more towards numbing than spice, but still had a good level of heat. I really enjoyed the tofu skins and noodles, which soaked up the broth after cooking. Next time, I’d order fewer dishes and more side dishes to hot pot.

Other dishes we tried that night were chicken with dried chilies, pea sprouts and a stir fried lamb and green onions. I order chicken with dried chilies at every Sichuan restaurant I visit and this was the first time I had to deal with more bones than meat. My best guess was that chicken wings were used. Seasoning and flavour were fantastic with lots of heat and numbness that kept me eating despite my lips burning and having to pick out tiny bones. The pea sprouts sauteed with garlic were young and fresh. Although the menu listed lamb with green onions, the dish arrived with normal onions. Delicious, but not what we expected. The onions added a sweetness that was a nice compliment to the rest of of fiery meal.

Kim Tao is a hotpot restaurant located in Richmond Hill with mixed reviews, mainly focused on the poor service. After my recent visit, my thoughts are mixed as well. On one hand the food was good quality and there were lots of elements included in the set price. On the other, service was inconsistent and they were understaffed. The two almost cancel each other out and to be honest, the service wasn’t rude or inefficient and relative to other Chinese hot pot places, not too off the mark.

Atmosphere: We had a large group and ended up seated at 2 round tables in the centre of the restaurant. The dining are was well ventilated and there wasn’t much steam built up inside. Paper and laminated signs covered the walls advertising specials in English and Chinese. The space felt worn and a little dingy but was clean and consistently full.

Service: My main gripes with service were the lack of care and inconsistency. Every server was friendly, but it didn’t make up for these two faults. First the lack of care. When ordering dinner, each table has an option to add a cooked dish (ie: rice pot). Our table only received one order form to select soup base, even though we knew we’d be getting three pots. So we tried to figure out how to place the form and then forgot to order our cooked dish, the server didn’t prompt us at all. At the end of our meal, it took a good 20 minutes to get our bill.

Second was the inconsistency. Either there was no one to refill the pot with stock, or they refilled it twice within the span of 5 minutes. This was the same for refills on the pitchers of plum juice or iced tea. Then there was the food portion. Unlike any other AYCE place, Kim Tao always brought more food than we ordered. We’d order 5 plates of lamb and at least 8 would show up. One serving of tripe was ¼ of a plate on the first order but turned into an entire plate for the second order. I didn’t understand how their order sheet translated to serving size.

Food: Where Kim Tao did deliver was the food. They had a great selection of sauces, peanut, garlic, cilantro, chili, satay, everything you could ask for. The broth selection was also decent and I liked how satay was non premium choice. I also loved that pitchers or plum juice and iced tea were complimentary and refills were provided. This was a big plus for me.

All of us chose the non seafood course and even then, squid and octopus were available. The selection and quality of hot pot ingredients was one of the best I’ve been to with tripe, fresh fish/beef balls, pork rind, gluten, all sorts of noodles, blood, seasonal vegetables and so much more. There wasn’t anything I found missing and for $20.99, it was a good deal.

Dessert of mango sago was also complementary but I found it watery and could’ve skipped it. Overall, with a little patience, Kim Tao is worth a visit based on the food and value.

With the weather warming up, I wanted to get in one more hotpot meal before the appeal of boiling soup diminished. Hotpot on Yonge opened about a year ago and they’ve been a welcome addition to the neighbourhood. Before that, my hotpot cravings had to be satisfied uptown or at my parent’s house. I do love to hotpot at home, but with two people it’s hard to buy a variety of ingredients without a ton of leftovers.

Atmosphere: The restaurant is clean and on busy nights, the windows are steamed up from the open pots of boiling broth. I would not recommend wearing anything that needs to be dry cleaned. Similar to a meal at Korean BBQ, you will smell like hotpot after. Hotpot is also typically a long meal. We ate for about 2 hours, which is about average.

Service: Like many Chinese restaurants, service was efficient if not the friendliest. We didn’t have any issues ordering in English although it does help to understand Mandarin or Cantonese. The menu is bilingual but the order sheet was only in Chinese. Each item was numbered, making it possible to fill out the order sheet while referencing the main menu. There are a few typos, spelling mistakes and the general translation issues with the menu. For example, if you’re a first time visitor it would be hard to differentiate between yam noodle, noodles, rice noodles and thick noodles. Luckily each food portion is small, which makes it low risk to order any item to try. If no one at the table likes it, it will just melt into the soup.

Food: Hotpot is essential a lot of fresh, raw ingredients cooked in boiling soup. Each ingredient is fished out when ready and eaten fresh with a dipping sauce. The typical items are thin slices of lamb and beef, various fish balls, seafood, mushrooms and all sorts of vegetables. My go-to order usually includes watercress, wintermelon, spinach, frozen tofu, enoki mushrooms, fish tofu, yam noodles, taro, lamb, beef and rice cakes.

At Hotpot on Yonge, the AYCE menu selection is varied and is on par with Hipot uptown. There is a seafood option that has costs a couple of dollars more. I usually skip this as the value add isn’t amazing. There are three broth choices included in the AYCE price and a few more premium options. I like the cilantro and satay broths myself. A wide variety of dipping sauce ingredients are also available including peanut, soy, satay, hot sauces and many more.

All of our ordered items were fresh and delivered at once allowing us to enjoy our meal and cook items in the sequence we wanted. My cooking order is always sliced meat and seafood until the broth becomes fatty and flavorful. Then I add in items that take longer to cook like wintermelon, dumplings and taro. Once the broth is a rolling boil again, fresh greens can be blanched and come out full of flavor from the broth. Last comes the carbs, ending the meal with whatever noodles I still have room for.

Included in the AYCE menu at Hotpot on Yonge is a bowl of mango pudding or herbal jelly for dessert.

It was the day after the Toronto ice storm and I woke up to no power. Luckily I had lunch plans for hotpot, the perfect meal for the occasion. Driving past downed trees and through intersections without traffic lights, I started to worry about whether or not Little Fat Sheep had been hit by the weather as well. It didn’t help that we arrived before the restaurant opened and sat waiting in the parking lot. All was well though and the lights did turn on.

Little Fat Sheep, 小肥羊, offers large communal pots and small individual size pots. On weekends for lunch, the AYCE seafood option is priced at $15.99 per person with an additional $2 charge for pots equipped with dividers that allow for two soup bases. I had the individual pot this time but I prefer the larger pot as there’s more broth making it easier to cook things. I found my pot filled up quickly with the “long cooking time” items and it was hard to get vegetables in. My favourite hotpot soup base is the Little Fat Sheep spicy one, which is what we always use when we hotpot at home.

Plates of beef and lamb slices are served to each table, everything else is self-serve. The selection of ingredients was more extensive than at Hipot with pretty much everything I could think of to hotpot. There was 6-7 vegetables, two types of rice cakes, two cuts of tripe, a selection of fish balls, 3 kinds of mushrooms, wintermelon, squid, taro, cuttlefish, tofu curd, tofu puffs, fried gluten, slices of pork and chicken, glass noodles, ramen noodles, so many other noodles and the list goes on.

Next to the food, there is a self-serve drinks area with pop, chrysanthemum tea and Chinese plum juice. Little Sheep also has a great sauce station with 12 different options and toppings. I always go for the sesame, chili oil and satay sauce topped with garlic and chopped cilantro. For dessert, they have fried mantou with condensed milk, fruit and some baked goods. Really, I was astonished by their selection. Service was hectic and nothing spectacular. We had to re-order a few things multiple times but we weren’t rushed for our table. I do like the self-serve buffet style but some may shy away from how the raw food is out in the open.

By the time we were leaving, the restaurant was packed with a long queue waiting for tables. I hear that this is a regular occurrence, not just weather related, and especially on weekends.