It’s nice to see that some parts of Chinatown are stepping out a bit and not just simply being replaced by cheap, nasty, buffets. Little Lamb is therefore a welcome addition to the other restaurants in London’s chinatown offering the unique hot pot dining experience. Also a popular dish with the Japanese (called shabu shabu), hot pot dining is definitely not like your normal Chinese fair.
Ordering hot pot is easy. Choose what sort of soup base you would like, and then order a wide variety of dishes to cook. They even have a £20 deal where you can order a soup base and five different plates of ingredients for each person dining which really equates to a large number over all. We didn’t intend of getting the deal but the waiter suggested we may as well being only £1 away and able to order three more plates. We decided to go with the three flavoured stock pot, not actually realising it would be an urn separated into three different parts, each complete with a different flavour. The induction cooker in the middle of the table also gave us very good control over the soup, without actually turning the table into a danger zone.
As you can see from the picture above, one of the three soups was a spicy, peppery soup, that was definitely one of my favourites. The other two were clear broths, both very flavoursome in their own different ways. The ingredients come on plates and I’m glad that there was just the two of us because those plates soon filled the table. We ordered a huge variety of different items, with at least one dish from the separate sections such as mushrooms, tofu, seafood, meat, noodles and vegetables. I’m particularly surprised at the size and number of the seafood dishes as we’d ordered crab and prawns and they were definitely generous serves considering the price.
If you do plan on having a meal at Little Lamb, make sure that you leave plenty of time with the ten plates taking us almost two hours to consume. Part of the fun is cooking it in small stages and then scooping hot the freshly cooked ingredients, dipping it into the sauce or just enjoying the whole experience. Eating the crab was definitely most challenging with the combination of tiny bowls and just chopsticks leaving us with little choice but to use our hands.
If you find yourself running low on soup, it’s easy enough for them to fill it with additional hot water. Also make sure you leave some space to enjoy the soup broth that becomes infused with all the flavours from the freshly cooked ingredients.
Name: Little Lamb
Address: 72 Shaftesbury Avenue, Chinatown, W1D 6NA
Phone: 020 7287 8078
Website: None that I could find