Hot Pot at Happy Lamb Holborn

Dann and I don’t tend to celebrate Valentine’s Day on the day. There are always too many people out and about, and we have traditions that we do with our own children that we prioritise. However, we do take a day out of the beginning of February and go out for Hot Pot. Hot Pot is one of Dann’s favorite things to have, and it’s a food that you eat slowly, while talking and hanging out, so it’s a great way to reflect on your relationship and each other. As a bonus, it’s absolutely delicious! This year, we went to Happy Lamb in Holborn.

You know when you walk into an asian restaurant and it’s full of mainly asian people? I absolutely love that feeling. At Happy Lamb, we walked in, and it was clear this was going to be a very good place to have hot pot at. They handed us a menu and we were sat at a table, which has a hot pot section in the middle where the hot pot is going to cook. This menu had boxes that we could tick off to order what food we wanted. Dann and I are big over-orderers, especially when it comes to hot pot. We got sliced lamb, sliced beef, beef meatballs, a vegetable platter, tied noodles, a mushroom platter, marinated beef in garlic and kimchi of course. This was actually a ton of food, especially for London prices, which we were impressed with.

For our soup base at Happy Lamb Holborn, we went with a split pot soup, one half being spicy cabbage and the other half being spicy chicken. The soup in hot pot is basically seasoned from a base soup, which has a good flavor, but the seasonings add more flavor to it, if that makes sense. The longer you sit and cook and let it boil, the more the flavors develop and change. They do come around a top up the soup with the base soup mixture, which always feels very magical! Dann and I also got some chili oil, garlic oil and soy sauce to create our own dipping sauce for our hot pot. To drink, Dann got some plum wine and I got pina coladas!

When it comes to cooking hot pot, the menu has all of the different times for what you order, but you sort of just play it by sight. We dumbed in mushrooms and potatoes, letting them cook, and then eating them when they seemed done. I absolutely loved the potato soaking in all of the flavors of the soup! Mushrooms were another big favorite, there were so many varieties that came on the platters, they were amazing. Dann really loved the lamb, I love the slice beef, the beef meatballs themselves were very dense for our liking, but still had a good beef-y-ness about them.

The kimchi was a little sweet and quite tangy, which I enjoyed very much. Everything was just very delicious and plentiful. When we saw the sizes of the portions, we didn’t know how they’d fit on the table, but the staff brought over a little side table that they placed a bunch of the plates on, which was very useful for us. I absolutely enjoyed my time at Happy Lamb Holborn and it was my favorite hot pot so far!

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